Diary of Anne Frank. Good Friday, April 18, 2025. Quran Day (Friday) in Islam too. Alternate-Reality storytelling Bible / Quran learning

MOYERS: Why are these stories so important to the human race?

CAMPBELL: It depends on what kind of story it is. If the story represents what might be called an archetypal adventure—the story of a child becoming a youth, or the awakening to the new world that opens at adolescence—it would help to provide a model for handling this development.

MOYERS: You talk about how stories help us through crises. When I read them as a child, they all had happy endings. It was a time before I learned that life is fraught with plodding, indulgent, and cruel realities. Sometimes I think we buy a ticket to Gilbert and Sullivan, and when we go into the theater, we find the play is by Harold Pinter. Maybe fairy tales make us misfits to reality.

CAMPBELL: Fairy tales are told for entertainment. You’ve got to distinguish between the myths that have to do with the serious matter of living life in terms of the order of society and of nature, and stories with some of those same motifs that are told for entertainment. But even though there’s a happy ending for most fairy tales, on the way to the happy ending, typical mythological motifs occur—for example, the motif of being in deep trouble and then hearing a voice or having somebody come to help you out.

Fairy tales are for children. Very often they’re about a little girl who doesn’t want to grow up to be a woman. At the crisis of that threshold crossing she’s balking. So she goes to sleep until the prince comes through all the barriers and gives her a reason to think it might be nice on the other side after all. Many of the Grimm tales represent the little girl who is stuck. All of these dragon killings and threshold crossings have to do with getting past being stuck.

The rituals of primitive initiation ceremonies are all mythologically grounded and have to do with killing the infantile ego and bringing forth an adult, whether it’s the girl or the boy. It’s harder for the boy than for the girl, because life overtakes the girl. She becomes a woman whether she intends it or not, but the little boy has to intend to be a man. At the first menstruation, the girl is a woman. The next thing she knows, she’s pregnant, she’s a mother. The boy first has to disengage himself from his mother, get his energy into himself, and then start forth. That’s what the myth of “Young man, go find your father” is all about. In the Odyssey, Telemachus lives with his mother. When he’s twenty years old, Athena comes and says, “Go find your father.” That is the theme all through the stories. Sometimes it’s a mystical father, but sometimes, as here in the Odyssey, it’s the physical father.

A fairy tale is the child’s myth. There are proper myths for proper times of life. As you grow older, you need a sturdier mythology. Of course, the whole story of the crucifixion, which is a fundamental image in the Christian tradition, speaks of the coming of eternity into the field of time and space, where there is dismemberment. But it also speaks of the passage from the field of time and space into the field of eternal life. So we crucify our temporal and earthly bodies, let them be torn, and through that dismemberment enter the spiritual sphere which transcends all the pains of earth. There’s a form of the crucifix known as “Christ Triumphant,” where he is not with head bowed and blood pouring from him, but with head erect and eyes open, as though having come voluntarily to the crucifixion. St. Augustine has written somewhere that Jesus went to the cross as a bride-groom to his bride.

MOYERS: So there are truths for older age and truths for children.

CAMPBELL: Oh, yes. I remember the time Heinrich Zimmer was lecturing at Columbia on the Hindu idea that all life is as a dream or a bubble; that all is maya, illusion. ::: PDF, Edited by Joseph Campbell himself. ::: After his lecture a young woman came up to him and said, “Dr. Zimmer, that was a wonderful lecture on Indian philosophy! But maya—I don’t get it—it doesn’t speak to me.”

“Oh,” he said, “don’t be impatient! That’s not for you yet, darling.” And so it is: when you get older, and everyone you’ve known and originally lived for has passed away, and the world itself is passing, the maya myth comes in. But, for young people, the world is something yet to be met and dealt with and loved and learned from and fought with—and so, another mythology.

MOYERS: The writer Thomas Berry says that it’s all a question of story. The story is the plot we assign to life and the universe, our basic assumptions and fundamental beliefs about how things work. He says we are in trouble now “because we are in between stories. The old story sustained us for a long time —it shaped our emotional attitudes, it provided us with life’s purpose, it energized our actions, it consecrated suffering, it guided education. We awoke in the morning and knew who we were, we could answer the questions of our children. Everything was taken care of because the story was there. Now the old story is not functioning. And we have not yet learned a new.”

CAMPBELL: I’m in partial agreement with that—partial because there is an old story that is still good, and that is the story of the spiritual quest. The quest to find the inward thing that you basically are is the story that I tried to render in that little book of mine written forty-odd years ago—The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The relationship of myths to cosmology and sociology has got to wait for man to become used to the new world that he is in. The world is different today from what it was fifty years ago. But the inward life of man is exactly the same. So if you put aside for a while the myth of the origin of the world—scientists will tell you what that is, anyway—and go back to the myth of what is the human quest, what are its stages of realization, what are the trials of the transition from childhood to maturity and what does maturity mean, the story is there, as it is in all the religions.

The story of Jesus, for example—there’s a universally valid hero deed represented in the story of Jesus. First he goes to the edge of the consciousness of his time when he goes to John the Baptist to be baptized. Then he goes past the threshold into the desert for forty days. In the Jewish tradition the number forty is mythologically significant. The children of Israel spent forty years in the wilderness, Jesus spent forty days in the desert. In the desert, Jesus underwent three temptations. First there was the economic temptation, where the Devil comes to him and says, “You look hungry, young man! Why not change these stones to bread?” And Jesus replies, “Man lives not by bread alone, but by every word out of the mouth of God.” And then next we have the political temptation. Jesus is taken to the top of a mountain and shown the nations of the world, and the Devil says to him, “You can control all these if you’ll bow down to me,” which is a lesson, not well enough made known today, of what it takes to be a successful politician. Jesus refuses. Finally the Devil says, “And so now, you’re so spiritual, let’s go up to the top of Herod’s Temple and let me see you cast yourself down. God will bear you up, and you won’t even be bruised.” This is what is known as spiritual inflation. I’m so spiritual, I’m above concerns of the flesh and this earth. But Jesus is incarnate, is he not? So he says, “You shall not tempt the Lord, your God.” Those are the three temptations of Christ, and they are as relevant today as they were in the year A.D. 30.

The Buddha, too, goes into the forest and has conferences there with the leading gurus of his day. Then he goes past them and, after a season of trials and search, comes to the bo tree, the tree of illumination, where he, likewise, undergoes three temptations. The first is of lust, the second of fear, and the third of submission to public opinion, doing as told.