Joseph Campbell, Symbols and Signs

I am currently dipping into a little ebook by Joseph Campbell, a man who writes (or, rather, wrote) much about world mythology. The book is "The Symbol Without Meaning". At the very beginning Campbell speaks of the "provincial character of all that we are prone to regard as universal". He gives as an example that many Americans "believe that the world was created in 1492 and redeemed in 1776". 

The beginning of the world?

Then he moves on to a more Euro-centric view, the belief that the world was created in 4004 BC ( as per the calculations of Bishop Ussher ) and redeemed in the first century AD. 

Well, maybe. I once thought that camels were more exotic than cows, pagodas more exotic that a church spire. But some thoughts and beliefs have a greater potential for deception and danger than others. Nevertheless, when we insist that our way is the One Way, or, as Mr Campbell has it, mistake the provincial for the universal, then we are on the road to Inquisitions - or whatever form intolerance takes in our own times. 

"They do him wrong who take God in one particular way; they have the way rather than God" (Meister Eckhart)

Moving on to symbols and signs. Apparently Jung saw the "sign" as a reference to something known, whereas the "symbol" is a figure by which allusion is made to an unknown. I have yet to read the complete book by Joseph Campbell so just how it all plays out I do not know. Maybe others can think about it if they have stumbled upon this, my latest blog. 

A sign - plain enough

Here, a selection of "symbols":-

As Jung has said, symbols make allusion to that which is unknown. I would just say that if we are not careful we shall merely turn them into signs, interpreting that which calls us to greater self knowledge into that which is already "known". That said, perhaps a symbol of Carl Jung would be a better example than the previous three.

Whatever, as I see it a symbol should call us into the unknown.

Strangely, or perhaps not, some lyrics of Bob Dylan have popped into my head.......

In the dime stores and bus stations

People talk of situations

Read books, repeat quotations

Draw conclusions on the wall

Some speak of the future

My love, she speaks softly

She knows there's no success like failure

And that failures no success at all

Bob Dylan

Anyway, I will continue with Mr Campbell's book and find what he thinks. A "symbol without meaning" indeed.

Postscript:- Joseph Campbell understands the mystical NOT as the knowledge of anything but as an "evocation of a sense of the absolutely unknowable". Like Jung, he sees the task  ( of modern man ) as being the recovery of wholeness. To assign meaning to any particular thing is to miss such unknowableness and wholeness. First there must be a "sense of existence" (which is the function of art) then the world appears as it is, each thing in its suchness. Assigning meanings (particularly definitive meanings) prior to this is thus counter-productive.

Hence "The Symbol Without Meaning", which is the entire Cosmos, our world. Reality-as-is.

Thus all things are a by-product of wisdom - wisdom defined (perhaps) as the "mind/heart thirsting for emancipation seeing direct into the heart of reality." (Conze)

For me "wisdom" is grace.