Sacrifice and Bliss

Summary

Throughout The Power of Myth the stuff of myth is cross-cultural, universal, and archetypical (biologically based), but in “Sacrifice and Bliss” Campbell first introduces “environmental determinism,” the notion that local “landscape” sculpts that “stuff.” Underlying the landscape imagery is a far deeper scientific truth – we are a living fresco inseparable from our plaster landscape. However, biblical dualism wrenches life from its own gut destroying both fresco and wall.

Analysis

“The sanctification of the landscape is a fundamental function of mythology.” (113). Campbell demonstrates how physical orientation of the “hogan” supports Navaho spirituality – the home as church, or as he says, “[the home] becomes an icon, a holy picture” (114). Compare this to Feng Shui, also used to harmonize people with nature.

Campbell says that “spiritual places inform a society” (118) and he is troubled by today’s lack of sacred places. “They don’t exist” (117). He contrasts the Promised Land, the Navaho’s sanctification of all land, the Icelandic’s adherence to the number 432,000, and Chartres Cathedral with today’s places that inform a society, office buildings (119). These “cathedrals” of commerce are spiritually bankrupt as are the cookie-cutter homes in which we live, as are the earth-destroying SUV’s in which we drive from our hermetically-sealed gated communities to our climate controlled office buildings. No time or space for inward reflection or the “transcendent absolute.”

Campbell suggests that we project our idea of “God” on the world, local geography shapes our image of divinity (125). However, he’s mystified by the origins of Hebraic monotheism, “This I do not understand” (125). He suggests that “When you are out in the desert with one sky and one world, then you might have one deity…” (124). Does “big sky” Montana qualify? Not necessarily. Campbell fails to consider the desert’s unique spirituality. Harsh desolation exudes inward reflection, respect for life, and interconnectedness or “oneness” with the cosmos: the very essence of spiritual (not biblical) monotheism. Spiritual oneness v. biblical dualism.
Campbell also suggests the one-god concept sprang from desert socialization. “Your whole commitment is to the society which is protecting you. Society is always patriarchal” (125). Here again, the reader is vexed. Why is it more likely that a patriarchy rather than a matriarchy invent monotheism? Perhaps men are more likely to have control issues; maybe the patriarch was a psycho, DSM IV-certified control freak creating the jealous, murderous, picayune Hebraic god in his own image.

Opinion

Geography is genesis; genesis, evolution. We are geography. By holding all things sacred, we sacrifice our materialistic minds and enter the realm of Black Elk; our train stops at “bliss station.” While moderns work feverishly to fulfill the white man’s manifest destiny (to rape the earth and leave it for dead), Campbell astutely reminds us that the “sacred place” is not limited to landscape; it’s a state of being, a place of “creative incubation” (115). So I will enter the arms race. I will hunt down and kill every “it” and replace it with a “thou” faster than humanity hunts down and kills every “thou” and replaces it with an “it.” Man v. machine. Wish me luck!