The Flight of the Wild Gander: Selected Essays 1944 - 1968

By Joseph Campbell

This title is part of the The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series

Explore the origins and impact of myth

What is the “meaning” of a tree? of a butterfly? of the birth of a child? or of the universe? What is the “meaning” of the song of a rushing stream? Such wonders simply are. They are antecedent to meaning, though “meaning” may be read into them. — Joseph Campbell

In these essays – contemporary with his years at Sarah Lawrence and with his legendary Cooper Union lectures – Campbell explores the origins of myth, from the Grimms’ fairy tales to Native American legends. He explains how the symbolic content of myth is linked to universal human experience and how the myths and experiences change over time. Included is the famed essay “Mythogenesis,” which traces the rise and decline of a Native American legend.

Reviews: In this book, as in his other work, Campbell displays his immense learning, drawing evidence to support his case from virtually every branch of human knowledge. — The New York Times Book Review

Campbell has become one of the rarest of intellectuals in American life: a serious thinker who had been embraced by the popular culture. — Newsweek

American Indian

Catal Huyuk

essays

mythogenesis

symbol without meaning

Quotations from this Title

Nature is prime: it is there at birth; Society is next: it is only a shaper of Nature, and a function, moreover, of what it shapes; whereas Nature is deep and, finally, as inscrutable as Being itself. [share]

How mythology functions, why it is generated and required by the human species, why it is everywhere essentially the same, and why the rational destruction of it conduces to puerility, become known the moment one abandons the historical method of tracing secondary origins and adopts the biological view ... which considers the primary organism itself, this universal carrier and fashioner of history, the human body.

[share]

Myth is dreamlike and, like dream, a spontaneous product of the psyche; like dream, revelatory of the psyche and hence of the whole nature and destiny of man; like dream –– like life –– enigmatic to the uninitiated ego; and, like dream, protective of that ego. [share]

Mythology is the womb of mankind's initiation to life and death. [share]

Mythology and the rites through which its imagery is rendered open the mind . . . not only to the local social order, but also to the mythic dimension of being – of nature – which is within as well as without, and thereby finally at one with itself. [share]

Mythology and the rites through which its imagery is rendered open the mind . . . not only to the local social order, but also to the mythic dimension of being – of nature – which is within as well as without, and thereby finally at one with itself. Moreover, the sentiments of this nature within are indeed innate: of love, for example, hate, fear, and disdain, wonder, terror, and joy. They are not 'developed in the individual,' as the anthropologist states, 'by the action of society upon him,' but evoked by these means and directed to social ends. Nature is prime: it is there at birth; Society is next: it is only a shaper of Nature, and a function, moreover, of what it shapes; whereas Nature is deep and, finally, as inscrutable as Being itself. [share]

Mythology and the rites through which its imagery is rendered open the mind . . . not only to the local social order, but also to the mythic dimension of being – of nature – which is within as well as without, and thereby finally at one with itself. [share]

Living myths are not mistaken notions, and they do not spring from books. They are not to be judged as true or false but as effective or ineffective, maturative or pathogenic. [share]

What is the "meaning" of a tree? of a butterfly? of the birth of a child? or of the universe? What is the "meaning" of the song of a rushing stream? Such wonders simply are. They are antecedent to meaning, though "meaning" may be read into them. [share]

Myths – that is to say, religious recitations – [are] conceived as symbolic of the play of eternity in time. These are rehearsed not for diversion, but for the spiritual welfare of the individual or community. [share]

God and Buddhas in the Orient are not final terms like Yahweh, the Trinity, or Allah, in the West—but point beyond themselves to that ineffable being, consciousness, and rapture that is the All in all of us. And in their worship, the ultimate aim is to effect in the devotee a psychological transfiguration through a shift of his plane of vision from the passing to the enduring, through which he may come finally to realize in experience (not simply as an act of faith) that he is identical with that before which he bows [share]

The "monstrous, irrational, and unnatural" motifs in folklore and myth are derived from the reservoirs of dream and vision. On the dream level such images represent the total state of the individual dreaming psyche. But clarified of personal distortions and profounded by poets, prophets, and visionaries, they become symbolic of the spiritual norm for Man the Microcosm. They are thus phrases from an image-language, expressive of a metaphysical, psychological, and sociological truth. [share]

If ever there was an art in which the whole community of man has worked – seasoned with the philosophy of the codger on the wharf and singing with the music of the spheres – it is this of the ageless tale. [share]