Joseph Campbell on the Sacredness of Nature
Fraser Boa quoting Joseph Campbell in The Way of Myth, Talking With Joseph Campbell, Shambhala, 1989.
As I deal with what are called primitive mythologies, or with Oriental [Tibetan Buddhism goes in this category - KtcBlog] mythologies, I see that nature is regarded as a manifestation of something that’s basically divine and marvelous and miraculous… But when I turn to our Western mythologies - as they exist in our spiritual traditions - I find a totally different point of view… Where does this come from?
Well, the first stage in the transformation comes from a system of religions that appears around the first millennium BC in the Near East - not the Far East, but the Near East. Its principal representatives …the Judaic-Christian line, and Zoroastrianism… have dual creation - good and evil, light and darkness, virtue and vice, truth and hypocrisy, and so on… we are invited to make the decision to align ourselves with the good. Now we are not asked to put ourselves in accord with a split nature like that; rather we asked to correct it! … This accounts for the tremendous accent on action in our culture. That’s one of the big, big problems.
The second problem is that the origin of this tradition is Semetic… and one of the characteristics of the Semetic religions is that the main deity is a personificaton of … the principles and ethics and history of that society. … When your main deity is your tribal deity … you get a basic exclusivism … from nature … And this exclusivism is built right into us because it is fundamental to the Judaic-Christian tradition.
A third force is that our mainstream religions in the West are scriptural and were formulated a little over two thousand years ago in another place. Therefore, we have been unable to sanctify our land. Our land doesn’t speak to us of the divine. Divine land is only over there in the Middle East. We make pilgimages to the Holy Land, or people go there to claim it from another people and make it their own again. This is a historical misinterpretation of spiritual symbols. The Holy Land isn’t in some other place. It’s right in here - right inside each of us.