Myths to Live By
Joseph Campbell
The two greatest works of war mythology in the West are the Iliad and the Old Testament. The late Bronze and early Iron Age Greeks were becoming masters of the ancient Aegean just about when the Amorites, Moabites, and earliest Habiru or Hebrews were overrunning Canaan. These were approximately contemporaneous invasions; and the legends celebrating their victories were developed simultaneously too. Moreover, the basic mythological concepts animating these two bodies of legend were not very different, either.
They both pictured a sort of two-storied world, with the floor of earth below, and above, an upper story of divine beings. On the earth-plane below, there were certain wars being waged—of “our” people overcoming “those” people—the progress of these wars being directed, however, from aloft.
In the case of the Iliad, the various gods of polytheistic pantheon are supporting variously both sides; for there are quarrels going on up there too, of Poseidon against the will of Zeus, Athena against Aphrodite, and Zeus for a time against Hera. As the arguments fare of the gods aloft, so the fortunes below of the armies on earth. And in fact, one of the most interesting things about the Iliad is that, though composed to honor the Greeks, its greatest honors and respect are for the Trojans. The noble Trojan champion Hector is the leading spiritual hero of the piece. Achilles, beside him, is a thug. And the tender episode, in Book VI, of Hector’s departure into battle from Andromache his wife and their little son Astyanax (“like a beautiful star” in his nurse’s arms) is surely the supreme moment of humanity, gentleness, and true manliness of the entire work.
“Dear my lord,” the good wife pleaded, “this thy hardihood will undo thee; for soon will the Achaians all set upon thee and slay thee.” And her splendid husband answered: “I pray thee, dear one, be not of oversorrowful heart. No man against my fate shall hurl me into Hades: only destiny, which no man has ever escaped, whether coward or valiant, once he has been born.” And when the little boy shrank in fear from his father’s shining helmet with its horsehair crest, Hector laughed aloud and, removing it, laid it gleaming on the earth, then kissed his son, dandled him in his arms, and spoke a prayer for him to Zeus before departing to be slain.
Or consider that magnificent tragedy of Aeschylus, The Persians: what an extraordinary production to have been presented in a Greek city hardly twenty years after Aeschylus himself had fought the invading Persians at Salamis! The setting is in Persia, with the queen of Persia and her court discussing the return of their defeated king Xerxes from that battle. It is written from the Persian point of view and shows with what respect and great capacity for empathy the ancient Greeks could regard even their most threatening enemy of that time.
But when we turn from the Iliad and Athens to Jerusalem and the Old Testament it is to a mythology with a very different upper story and very different power up there: not a polytheistic pantheon favoring both sides simultaneously, but a single-minded single deity, with his sympathies forever on one side. And the enemy, accordingly, no matter who it may be, is handled in this literature in a manner in striking contrast to the Greek, pretty much as though he were subhuman: not a "Thou" (to use Martin Buber's term), but a thing, an "It." I have chosen a few characteristic passages that we shall all—I am sure—readily recognize, and which, rehearsed in the present context, may help us to realize that we have been bred to one of the most brutal war mythologies of all time.
First, then, as follows:
“When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than yourselves, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them; then you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. You shall not make marriages with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons. For they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods; then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you utterly. But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn their graven images with fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth [Deuteronomy 7:1-6].”
“When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoils, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here. But in the cities of these people that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded [Deuteronomy 20:10-18].”
“And when the Lord your God brings you into the land which he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you, with great and goodly cities, which you did not build, and houses full of all good things, which you did not fill, and cisterns hewn out, which you did not hew, and vineyards and olive trees, which you did not plant, and when you eat and are full, then take heed lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage [Deuteronomy 6:10-12].”
And when, in reading, we move on from Deuteronomy to the greatest war book of all, Joshua, there is—most famous of all—the legend of the fall of Jericho. The trumpets blew, the walls fell down. "And then," as we read,
"they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword .... And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord" (Joshua 6:21, 24).The next city was Ai.
"And Israel smote them, until there was left none that survived or escaped . . . . And all who fell that day, both men and women, were twelve thousand, all of the people of Ai” (Joshua 8: 22, 25 ).
"And so Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb, and the lowland and the slopes, and their kings. He left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded" (Joshua 10:40).
And that, the very same Lord God so frequently cited by our doves of peace today as having taught, "Thou shalt not kill!”
But above and beyond all this there soars that beautiful ideal of an ultimate and universal peace, which, from the time of Isaiah onward, has played so alluringly through all the leading war mythologies of the West. There is, for example, that beguiling image so frequently cited, at the close of Isaiah 65, where "the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; and dust shall be the serpent's food. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, says the Lord:"
However, just a little earlier in the same Isaiah we have already been given to know what the ideal of the peace to come is actually to be: "The foreigners," we have there to read,
“shall build up your walls and their kings shall minister to you; for in my wrath I smote you, but in my favor I have had mercy on you. Your gates shall be open continually; day and night they shall not be shut; that men may bring to you the wealth of nations, with their kings led in procession. For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you shall perish; those nations shall be utterly laid waste. The glory of Lebanon shall come to you, the cypress, the plane tree, and the pine, to beautify the place of my sanctuary; and I will make the place of my feet glorious. The sons of those who oppressed you shall come bending low to you; and all who despised you shall bow down at your feet; they shall call you the City of the Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel” [Isaiah 60:10-14].
Now it was strange, and not a little threatening and awesome, to hear echoes of these same themes emanating from the jubilation of victory in Israel, just following the six-day Blitzkrieg and Sabbath on the seventh, of recent date. This mythology, that is to say, unlike the ancient Greek, is still very much alive.
Joseph Campbell's most well-known works are The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), and the famous television series, The Power of Myth,