A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (9 page)

Ritual introduces you

to the meaning of what’s going on.

Saying grace before meals

lets you know that you’re about to eat

something that once was alive.

When eating a meal, realize what you are doing. Hunting peoples thank the animal for having given itself. They feel real gratitude. The main rituals of mature hunting tribes, like those of the Americas, were addressed to the animal. On the Northwest Coast, the principle rites were when the first wave of salmon came in, and they were intended to thank the salmon.

The life of the animal that you’ve taken

is given back when you recognize

what you’ve done.

And so, sitting down to eat, realize what you are doing: you are eating a life that has been given so that you might live.

…man, like no other animal, not only knows that he is killing when he kills but also knows that he too will die; and the length of his old age, furthermore, is—like his infancy—a lifetime in itself, as long as the entire span of many a beast.
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When I was working on the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, I had a lot of meals with the monks. Their grace before meals is the most beautiful invocation. It goes like this: “
brahman
is the cosmic, universal, life consciousness energy of which we are all manifestations.
brahman
is the sacrifice.
brahman
is the food that we are eating.
brahman
is the consumer of the sacrifice.
brahman
is the ladle that carries the sacrifice to the fire.
brahman
is the process of the sacrifice. He who recognizes that all things are
brahman
is on the way to realizing
brahman
in himself.”

The meaning of this grace is that taking food into your system is like putting a libation into a sacrificial fire: the fire of your digestive apparatus consumes what you eat, so eating is the counterpart of a sacrifice.

The communion ritual is an extension of this idea, a motif that came into the world with the dawn of agriculture: “If the seed does not die, there is no plant.” It dies as seed and yields to the sprout. Now, since we are composed of spirit and matter—the two substances are what live in us—we need two types of food. The food that nourishes our material part—vegetables, animals, whatever it is we eat—is earthly food, but we must also have spiritual food, nourishment for our spiritual part. And communion, the eating of Christ, is a symbolization of the imbibing of that spiritual nourishment, a concretization of the idea of meditation, But in order to eat anything, it has to be killed, so again we have this notion of the sacrifice.

You should be willing

to be eaten also.

You are food body.

Every ritual is of that order, properly putting your mind in touch with what you really are doing. And so, we should realize that this event here and now: our coming together to help each other in the realization is a beautiful, beautiful ritual.

You can ritualize your entire life that way, and it’s extremely helpful to do so. The whole thing of compassion comes in there. What helped me was waking up and thinking of my penny catechism: “to know, to love, to serve God.” I don’t think of God as up there. I think of God as right here in whatever I’m knowing and loving and serving. “To be happy with Him forever in heaven” means to recognize your own compassion, your own participation in that creature or person you’re with. That seems to be the goal of the journey.

T
he principle ritual in most puberty and initiation rites is a death and resurrection ritual in which your name is changed. You die to the name you had and are resurrected with a new identity.

I once saw a film of the consecration of a group of young men who were becoming monks. They were standing in the aisle of a church, and then they all prostrated themselves, and a great canvas emblazoned with the cross was laid over them. When the canvas was removed, they were monks.

The experience of boys being initiated in Australia and New Guinea is of death. Their eyes are covered, and they hear the bullroarer coming, and they are told that the dragon is coming to consume them. When itis right over their heads and they’re about to be eaten, their eyes are uncovered, and now initiated, they see that it’s Uncle Charlie with the bullroarer.

In another such rite, described in a book about the Ona of Tierra del Fuego, the boy is in the men’s house, where there are these masked forms that he believes to be deities and punishing powers. One of them comes forward, and the boy has to wrestle with him. The man whom he's fighting almost puts the boy down, but then he yields. He lets the boy defeat him and pull off his mask. Then the mask is not simply regarded as a fake. It is both conquered and worshiped, because it represents both the bounding and the bonding power of the society. The boy puts the mask on himself, and he is now that power. What was feared is transformed into what is now supported.

I was very much interested in the work of George Catlin, who did hundreds of paintings of American Indians. He traveled among the Mandan Indians in 1832 and painted a series of pictures depicting their initiation rites. The young men are hung from the ceiling by spikes through their chests and spun around until they collapse. One young man said to him, “Our women suffer, and we must learn to suffer too.”

That was, to me, a very interesting observation, because suffering overtakes women. There is nothing they can do to avoid it. When a girl has her first menstruation, she's a woman.

Now the fear of menstrual blood, which is almost biological in the male, is in primitive cultures emphatic. There is a real fear of it that incorporates the whole mystery and power. Consequently, the girl’s initiation at that time usually consists of her sitting, isolated, in a little hut, realizing that she is a woman. Next thing she knows, in most societies, she’s a mother.

I’ve been told by some women that the first crash-through of this blood is a shock and a fearful thing. It’s a threshold-crossing that you’ve been pushed across. You don’t have to strive for anything. What you have to do is come to know what’s happened: appreciate the implications of the biological change that’s taken place without effort. After listening to many women, I have had the realization that the woman’s characteristic experience is having to endure something, and that the prime requirement is tolerance, the ability to endure.

The man, on the other hand, has to go out to seek the problem. The boy, accordingly, has to be systematically withdrawn from the women and put in the men’s camp in order to find his action field. As a man, he will have to endure only moments of great pain and struggle and difficulty with things just out of sight, which is what gets thrown at him in the initiation rites. The boy has to
enact
being a man. The girl has to
realize
that she’s a woman. Life overtakes her.

The man never has a comparable experience. That's why many male initiation rites are so violent—so that the man knows for certain he is no longer a little boy. And that’s also why a young man has to be disengaged from his mother. In our culture, there are mothers who understand this and assist in the separation. A clinging mother is a terrible weight on the life of a young man. In the primitive cultures, they are definitely separated.

I was just reading of a Hindu rite in Bengal, where the woman’s condition is extremely blocked. As a girl, she has to do what her father tells her to do; when she marries, she has to do what her husband tells her to do; when he dies, if she doesn’t throw herself on the funeral pyre, she has to do what her oldest son tells her to do. She’s never her own boss. Her only strong emotional connections are with her children, and the strongest is with her son.

So, there is this ritual to enable the woman to let her son go. Over a series of years, the family chaplain, the guru, comes and asks her for some valuable thing that she must give him. It starts with some of her jewelry—about the only possessions she has—and then she has to give up certain food that she likes. She has to learn to be quit of that which she values. Then comes the time when her son is no longer a little boy, and by then she has learned how to say that the most precious thing in her life can go.

H
ave I ever told you about the ritual in Kentucky where I had to give up seven things? It was one of the most interesting group experiences I’ve ever had. We were a group of about forty-nine people in one of those meetings of some society for the transformation of consciousness. Two couples from the University of Vermont, professors and their wives, had arranged a ritual that we were all going to undertake. We were divided into seven groups of seven and told to spend a day thinking of the seven things without which we’d not want to live: “What are the seven things for which you feel your life is worth living?” Then you were to gather seven little objects, small enough to hold in your hand, which were to represent your seven cherished things, and you were to know which was which.

In the evening we went down a wooded road in the dark to the mouth of a cave. The cave had a wooden door on it which could be opened. In front of the door was a man wearing the mask of a dog: Cerberus at the gate of hell. He put his hand out and said, “Give me that which you least cherish.” When you gave him one of the little objects you were holding, he opened the door and allowed you to enter.

Then you proceeded forward through the cave, an enormous place, holding the six remaining things you most cherished. On five further occasions, you were asked to surrender that which you least cherished, until you were left with one object that represented what you treasured most. And you found out what it was, believe me. You really, really did. And the order in which you gave up your treasures was revelatory: you really knew what your order of values was. Then you came to an exit, where there were two people between whom you had to go. But before you could go through that guarded exit, you had to give up that which you most cherished.

I can tell you that ritual worked. All of the participants with whom I’ve talked had an actual experience of
mokṣa
, “release,” when they had given up their last treasure. One damned fool was the exception. He did not give up anything. That’s how seriously this ritual was taken. When he was asked to give up something, he just stooped down, picked up a pebble, and handed that over. That’s the refusal of the call. 

…every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late.
⁴⁶

 The exciting thing to me was the actual experience. It was a feeling of joyous participation. Watching your earlier bondages go really did change your feeling for the treasures you’d given up. It increased your love for them without the tenacity. I was amazed.

T
HE
meditation associated with catastrophes like the end of the world is on this process of coming and going, coming and going, and settling yourself at peace with the fact that things come and go.

Apocalypse

does not point to a fiery Armageddon,

but to our ignorance and complacency

coming to an end.

I’ve been feeling that a terrific amount of the anxiety associated with the fear of an impending atomic explosion and the dissolution of the universe is a projection of anxiety coming from a world of people who have never found the center beyond coming and going. If you are at peace with eternity, the blowing up of the universe is perfectly acceptable—just as your own death has to be acceptable. It is going with organic processes. Everything that comes… goes.

…the hero would be no hero if death held for him any terror; the first condition is reconciliation with the grave.
⁴⁷

Chief Seattle, of the Indians that inhabited the Seattle area, wrote a wonderful paper that has to do with putting oneself in tune with the universe. He said, “Why should I lament the disappearance of my people? All things end, and the white man will find this out also.” And this goes for the universe. One can be at peace with that. This doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t participate in efforts to correct the situation, but underlying the effort to change must be an “at peace.” To win a dog sled race is great. To lose is okay too.

The world of human life is now the problem. Guided by the practical judgment of the kings and the instruction of the priests of the dice of divine revelation, the field of conscious-ness so contracts that the grand lines of the human comedy are lost in a welter of cross-purposes. Men’s perspectives become flat, comprehending only the light-reflecting, tangible surfaces of existence. The vista into depth closes over. The significant form of the human agony is lost to view. Society lapses into mistake and disaster. The Little Ego has usurped the judgment seat of the Self.
⁴⁸

Let us imagine ourselves for a moment in the lecture hall. …Above, we see many lights. Each bulb is separate from the others, and we may think of them, accordingly, as separate from each other.

…just as each bulb seen aloft is a vehicle of light, so each of us below is a vehicle of consciousness. But the important thing about a bulb is the quality of its light. Likewise, the important thing about each of us is the quality of his con-sciousness. And although each may tend to identify himself mainly with his separate body and its frailties, it is possible also to regard one’s body as a mere vehicle of consciousness and to think then of consciousness as the one presence here made manifest through us all.
⁴⁹

If the body is a light bulb, and it burns out,

does that mean there’s no more electricity?

The source of energy remains.

We can discard the body and go on.

We are the source.

“For that which is born, death is certain, and for that which is dead, birth is certain. You should not grieve over the unavoidable.…The Supreme Self which dwells in all bodies, can never be slain.…Weapons cut it not; fire burns it not; water wets it not; the wind does not wither it. Eternal, universal, unchanging, immovable, the Self is the same forever. …Dwelling in all bodies, the Self can never be slain. There-fore you should not grieve for any creature.”
—Bhagavad Gītā
⁵⁰