A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (24 page)

T
he principle characterization of Athene is as the guardian of heroes, as a patroness, like Lakṣmī, the Indian goddess who isthe supporter of the king or of anybody who then becomes her hero. We find Athene depicted in art as the protector of heroes: she is there when Perseus takes the head of Medusa, and she is the one who initiates the young man into his heroic career. In the
Odyssey,
she tells Telemachus to go find his father. She is present when Odysseus lands on the island of Scherie and meets the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa, and she is again present at the meeting of father and son. So, we can think of her as the guardian of heroes.

Athene is also the protectress of the Acropolis, the fortress of the city. Athene relates to the father, not to the mother. Her mother was Metis, but when Metis was pregnant, Zeus swallowed her, so she gave birth to her child in Zeus’ belly, and Athene emerged from his head. That’s what Freud calls a transfer to above—the birthplace of the male creation—and she comes forth from there. In societies with such traditions, as I see it, the mother is the mother of our nature. The child is born of the mother and is the little nature object. The father is the parent of one’s social maturity. Hence, in the boy’s initiation, he goes from the mother to the men’s camp, and they initiate him.

Father is the separator.

Mother brings together.

Hera is the consort of Zeus, who represents royal rule, the justice that governs the world, so she is matron of the household. This role is different from that of Athene, patron of the heroic adventure. In the contrast between seductress and wife, Hera is the wife, and the seductress role goes to Aphrodite. Aphrodite, however, is more than just the seductress. She is the goddess of all love, a tremendously powerful figure, for love can overtake a person as seductress, but it is also the supporting love of life.

The Ouranian Venus is the one who gives the inspiration of the muses that is the inspiration of the spirit. She feeds not only the body but the spirit as well. The way she pours life into the world shows that this one life is the one truth of all things. That’s why I think that the woman as artist is in a field which furnishes not only physical life but spiritual life as well—the spiritual life at once the revealing power.

I have noticed that the way women look at children is different from the way men do. There are two ways of looking at a little kid in an airplane toddling up and down the aisle: one is the way the woman looks at the child; the other is the way the man does. That’s why I say that the prime female power and virtue is compassion: the lack of egoistic isolation , the opening to participation. Even in sex, the man is aggressive, but the woman opens. The opening to that ubiquitous presence which is the ground of us all is compassion. Recognizing that spontaneous feeling, embracing it, and manifesting it in action is the female power.

I
n my book
The Mythic Image
, I have a wonderful story about Kuan-yin, one of the personifications of the great Mahāyāna Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, the embodiment of compassion.
¹²¹

It seems that Kuan-yin realized that in a certain part of China, out in the rural areas, nobody had ever heard of enlightenment. They were all interested in horse racing and all this macho stuff. So she turns herself into a gloriously beautiful girl, comes into town with fresh fish from the river to sell, and when her basket is empty, she disappears. Early the next day, this beautiful fish-selling girl is there again, and then once again she disappears. This daily pattern continues, and soon all of the men have become enchanted by her.

One morning, when she appears, about ten or twenty of them surround her and say, “You have to marry one of us.” “Well,” she says, “I cannot marry twenty men, but tomorrow morning, if one of you can recite by heart the Sūtra of the Compassionate Kuan-yin, I will marry that man.” The next morning, a dozen men know the entire sūtra by heart, so she says, “Well, I cannot marry all of you, but I will marry the one who can interpret this sūtra to me tomorrow.”

The next day, there are four men who can interpret the sūtra, so now she says, “I am only one woman, and I can’t marry four men, but if one of you has
experienced
the meaning of this sūtra three days from now, then I will marry that man.”

Three days later, there is but one man waiting for her. Now she says, “My little house is down by the bend in the river. Come there this evening, and you will be my husband.”

So that evening, he goes to where the shore bends and comes to a little house. An old couple is standing outside, and the old man says, “Oh, we’ve been waiting a long, long time for you. Our daughter is inside.” But when he goes into the room, it’s empty. She isn’t there. So he looks out the window and sees footprints, which he follows down to the river, where he finds a little pair shoes at the water’s edge, but no girl.

Then, as he’s standing there, with the reeds blowing and so forth, he realizes that all the reeds and everything else is she. Through her allure and charm, which is what the female figures represent in these Mahāyāna images, he realizes the nirvāṇic grace of beauty in the universe. Having understood the sūtra, he knew what he was experiencing, and he received illumination.

Dante realized something of this kind at the end of
The Divine Comedy
. He had followed the allure of Beatrice, who had guided him through the heavens to the very throne of God, and when he got there, she was there, together with the Trinity and the angelic forms. Behind the three persons of the Trinity, he saw three circles of flame and light, which represented the non-personal aspect of the god. He said that he was wondering how the personified forms and non-personified illumination could be the same, when suddenly he under-stood that the whole world was of the love and grace of God: the love he’d first experienced in Beatrice.

When it’s all love,

all must be love.

Nothing must interfere:

love conquers all.

[Discuss]

N
OW
the Indian term for “illusion,”
māyā
—from the verbal root
mā,
“to measure, to measure out, to form, to create, construct, exhibit or display”—refers to both the power that creates an illusion and the false display itself. The art of a magician, for example, is
māyā
; so too the illusion he creates. The arts of the military strategist, the me-chant, actor, and thief: these also are
māyā
.
Māyā
is experienced as fascination, charm; specifically, feminine charm. And to this point there is a Buddhist saying: “Of all the forms of
māyā
that of woman is supreme.”
¹²²

Let’s say we have the world of that which is no world: the Garden of Eden
before
the world of duality, the transcendent mystery. Then we have the world of things: the world of duality and multiplicity, of
māyā
, where we’ve lost connection with the transcendence.

Māyā
is that power

which converts transcendence

into the world.

As a cosmogenic principle—and as a feminine, personal principle, also—māyā is said to possess three powers:

1. A Veiling Power that hides or conceals the “real,” the inward essential character of things; so that, as we read in a sacred Sanskrit text: “Though it is hidden in all things, the Self shines not forth.”
   ¹²³
   The first stage, the veil, manifests from the fact that you don’t see the white light. This is what is called the
   māyā
   veil. The image that’s given is of white light broken into the colors of the rainbow by a prism. This prism is the Goddess. With the veiling power, the obscuring power, the white light can’t get through.
   
2. A Projecting Power, which then sends forth illusionary impressions and ideas, together with associated desires and aversions—as might happen, for example if at night one should mistake a rope for a snake and experience fright. Ignorance (the Veiling Power), having concealed the real, imagination (the Projecting Power) evolves phenomena. And so we read: “This power of projection creates all appearances, whether of gods or of the cosmos.”
   ¹²⁴
   With the projecting power, the forms of the world come through. The prism is the veil, but it is also the projector: what stops the white light and what projects the colors of the rainbow. In this second stage, the white light shows through the forms of the world. If you put a number of colors on a disk and spin it, you’ll get a
   white
   spinning disk—that’s the revealing power.
   These first two powers, concealing and projecting, can be compared to those properties of a prism by which sunlight is transformed into the colors of the rainbow. Arrange these seven colors on a disk, spin it, and they will be seen as white. So too, when viewed a certain way, the phenomena themselves may reveal what normally they veil; which demonstrates:
   
3. The Revealing Power of
   māyā
   , which it is the function of art and scripture, ritual and meditation: to make known.
   ¹²⁵
   

It is the function of art to serve

the revealing power of
māyā
.

Fear and desire

are the problem of the artist also.

We need more poetry that reveals

what the heart is ready to recognize.

…the first function of art is exactly that which I have already named as the first function of mythology; to transport the mind in experience past the guardians—desire and fear—of the paradisal gate to the tree within of illuminated life. In the words of the poet Blake, in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
¹²⁷
But the cleansing of the doors, the wiping away of the guardians, those cherubim with their flaming sword, is the first effect of art, where the second, simultaneously, is the rapture of recognizing in a single hair “a thousand golden lions.”
¹²⁸

“Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.”
¹²⁹
That is James Joyce. The statement is quoted in
Ulysses
by Buck Mulligan. The situation is that Leopold Bloom, thinking of his home problem, is looking intently at a red triangle on the label of a bottle of Bass ale. When someone starts to disturb Bloom, Mulligan stops him, saying, “…preserve a druid silence. His soul is far away. It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born. Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access…,” and so on.

Take, for example, a pencil, ashtray, anything, and holding it before you in both hands, regard it for a while. Forgetting its use and name, yet continuing to regard it, ask yourself seriously, “What is it?”…Cut off from use, relieved of nomenclature, its dimension of wonder opens; for the mystery of the being of that thing is identical with the mystery of the being of the universe—and of yourself.
¹³⁰

Art is the transforming experience.

The revelation of art is not ethics, nor a judgment, nor even of humanity as one generally thinks of it. Rather, the revelation is a marveling recognition of the radiant Form of forms that shines through all things.

In the simplest terms, I think we might say that when a situation or phenomenon evokes in us a sense of existence (instead of some reference to the possibility of an assurance of meaning) we have had an experience of this kind. The sense of existence evoked may be shallow or profound, more or less intense, according to our capacity or readiness; but even a brief shock (say, for example, when discovering the moon over city roofs or hearing a sharp bird cry at night) can yield an experience of the order of no-mind: that is to say, the poetical order, the order of art. When this occurs, our own reality-beyond-meaning is awakened (or perhaps better: we are awakened to our own reality-beyond-meaning), and we experience an affect that is neither thought nor feeling but an interior impact. The phenomenon, disengaged from cosmic references, has disengaged ourselves, by that principle, well known to magic, by which like conjures like. In fact, both the magic of art and the art of magic derive from and are addressed to experiences of this order. Hence the power of the meaningless syllables, the mumbo jumbo of magic, and the meaningless verbalizations of metaphysics, lyric poetry, and art interpretation. They function evocatively, not referentially; like the beat of a shaman’s drum, not like a formula of Einstein. One moment later, and we have classified the experience and may be having utterable thoughts and describable feelings about it—thoughts and feelings that are in the public domain, and they will be either sentimental or profound, according to our educa-tion. But according to our life, we have had, for an instant, a sense of existence: a moment of unevaluated, unimpeded, lyric life—antecedent to both thought and feeling; such as can never be communicated by means of empirically verifiable propositions, but only suggested by art.
¹³¹