Joseph Campbell and the Unity of Mythology

Chris Moore

There is a wonderful quote at the beginning of  each of Joseph Campbell's books in the Masks of God series that nicely sums up his work and is applicable here to the creation of evolution ficiton. Campbell wrote that the result of his twelve years working on the books confirmed one of his long held beliefs:

"of the unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also in its spiritual history, which has everywhere unfolded in the manner of a single symphony, with its themes announced, developed, amplified and turned about, distorted, reasserted, and, today, in a grand fortissimo of all sections sounding together, irresistibly advancing to some kind of climax, out of which the next great movement will emerge."

This is a large piece of text to take in all at once, I know, but the point is that in the beginning, man was united. Meaning, for Campbell, and for those who believe in mitochondrial Eve, even those who believe in Genesis, back in the mists of time there was only one group of humans closely grouped together and sharing a mythology. From that point, and after years and years of exploration and adventures man inhabited the earth, but he always took with him biological marks of his common ancestry and, somewhere tucked inside, the memories and myths of his earlier people.

But what does this mean for the writer. And here it should be plain enough, but Campbell in the same passage gives the answer when he writes: "I can see no reason why anyone should suppose that in the future the same motifs already heard will not be sounding still..." His book, as he says, furnishes those motifs and suggests "ways in which they might be put to use by reasonable men for reasonable ends--or by poets to poetic ends--or by madmen to nonsense and disaster." This passage opens up the wonder and possibility of the past for the next stage of human life and mythology. It's only for the poets of the moment and in the future to take them and help to create the reality we live in.

Respect the Ancestor

Levi Strauss and Evolution Fiction

There has been a trend among authors of fiction about the prehistoric past to paint their human characters as, while not exactly stupid, then either childlike or ideological. The primitive characters are not only ignorant but their thought patterns and cultural arrangements are modernly atavistic and retarded at some lesser stage of human development. In other words, authors generally paint their primitive fiction characters as stereotypical cavemen, whose beliefs are not only irrational but unscientific and anti-modern.

The problem is that this is an arrogant view of human primitive history, and this modern, euro-centric view should not find its way into fiction. Primitive man was not simply, or at all times, a slave to and of their savage environments. And though they would have been in danger of attack, or drought, or climate change, and vulnerable at so many times of their lives, our ancient ancestors were certainly capable of accurate thought. Claude Levi-Strauss in "Myth and Meaning," called this "disinterested thinking." Which is a form of thought that proceeds by "intellectual means, exactly as a philosopher, or even to some extent a scientist, can and would do." To be fair, Strauss follows this statement by arguing that primitive man's thinking was not in fact the same as scientific thinking, in that primitive man sought to find a total understanding of his world and used mythology to do so in an illusory manner. Whereas scientific thinking moves "step by step" seeking only to prove those things that it can prove. Yet the idea that primitive man could think disinterestedly and "scientifically" about his world and that, in order to survive he had to have an intensely accurate picture of his surrounding environment, knowing the local plant and animal life better than we know our super markets or local road systems, is to say that he was closer to us than we give him credit for.

And while primitive man would have had a total mythology that while descriptive was less than accurate, its narrative gave his life cohesion and order, which is somehting it seems that man everywhere in everytime has sought. Just think of things that people tell themselves today. While there is not a single cohesive narrative that all westerners tell themselves, to think that myth is not alive and well is to believe in a very different myth all together.

This is to say that primitive man was thinking and active, and every bit as modern as we are now, though he did not have the internet and he did not believe that he was detached from his natural environment. And that writers of evolution fiction should take into account  that man at all times was always man. He may have been ignorant of many things, but he was not stupid, nor, as many like to depict him, was he blinded by modern ideology. What primitive man did had to work. If it did not he died. There was no room for a cosmogony or political view that could not help him to live, and this should be expressed in our fiction about the prehistoric past.