During the past few months I have been studying an extraordinarily interesting paper written by Joseph Campbell, whose name will be familiar to many of you as the author of a book on mythology called The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell is also the editor of the posthumous works of Heinrich Zimmer, which had been published by the Bollingen Foundation. And, as a matter of fact, an extraordinary amount of those works is his own original writing, since they were compiled from Heinrich Zimmer’s notes. But the particular paper I mentioned now was presented, I think, in 1957, in August, at the Eranos Conference in Ascona in Switzerland, a meeting of scholars and philosophers and psychologists and scientists which gathers every year under the auspices of a lady who has for a long time been interested in the work of C. G. Jung. And the particular paper which Joseph Campbell presented at this conference was called The Symbol Without Meaning. It isn’t published in this country as yet, and only appears in the Eranos Jahrbuch for 1957, which is published in Switzerland, but I expect it’ll shortly be forthcoming in the excerpts from the papers delivered at those conferences which are published by the Bollingen Foundation.

Now, this particular paper—The Symbol Without Meaning—is an exploration of an extraordinary phenomenon in the history of religions which you might call the beginning, the development, and the dissolution of cosmologies; of great views of the world under religio-philosophical auspices which are the, as it were, languages about the universe devised by various cultures. Now, he distinguishes two great phases in man’s religious history, which he equates with two styles of culture which predate our own technological style of culture, and these are respectively the hunting cultures and the agrarian cultures.

He points out that the kind of religion which is characteristic of a hunting culture is what now generally goes by the name of shamanism, although this particular word is distinctive of Mongolian styles of so-called primitive religion. Nevertheless, the phenomenon known as shamanism is found distributed all over the planet. Shamanism is characterized by the fact that it’s a very individualistic type of religiousness—that is to say, the religious experience of the shaman is not something which he gets from an authoritative priesthood, it’s not something handed down from generation to generation for which he goes to a human teacher. The shaman is a solitary medicine man, man of power, who invariably has to find his experience for himself. Usually it is by going alone into the dangers of the forests or jungles, or holding himself up for some days in his own hut and undergoing some kind of ordeal—not necessarily on the physical level so much as on the psychic level: going through an adventure in the psychic world, the world of spirits. And when he comes through the ordeal, he comes out an initiate of power.

The reason why one must attach so much importance to the individual character of this experience is that it goes along with the general style of a hunting culture in which every individual man contains the whole culture—that is to say, it’s not the kind of culture in which specialized functions are needed; in which there is a division of labor. The hunter spends much of his time on his own, and he has to learn to take care of himself in the forests without any other human aid. And although there are societies and social groups, they are composed of men—with their women and children—men who are equals because of the type of life that they follow.

Now, an entirely different state of affairs arises when we get a settled agrarian culture. Here, because the style of life is more complex, a division of labor is required, and you begin to get not only a separation of human beings into various castes, into various functions, but also the necessity of devising far more complex languages and institutions to provide communication between them. And this always involves a very, very powerful socialization of the individual. Spending his time more and more in a settled place, therefore having greater intercourse with other people, he has to learn to think in accordance with common patterns. Whether these patterns be based on language, or on the type of work, the geographical features of the area which he inhabits, or whatever they may be, each individual has to subordinate himself more and more to a socially implanted view of life, because only under these conditions is communication between the individuals possible. And so it comes about that the style of religiousness which one associates with an agrarian (as distinct from a hunting) culture is a traditional and authoritative style of religion in which the individual derives his experience from a tradition usually embodied in a priesthood.

And Campbell goes on to point out that the first historical instances of the appearance of the familiar circle symbol—which is called in Sanskrit the mandala—is associated with the agrarian cultures. No example of this kind of symbol is found, archaeologically, prior to the development of an agrarian community. Now, I might say something about the mandala as a world mythological symbol, although anybody who’s studied the works of C. G. Jung is very familiar with it. A mandala is essentially a circle, usually divided into four quarters, or multiples of four, and has in it, as it were, the general theme of the integration of a community. It is not unlike, for example, a stockaded village or city: a ring of defense around a center. And Campbell shows that the symbol represents the formation of the kind of society we’re talking about, where the human functions are divided, and we find in many of these ancient societies that the functions are precisely divided into four groups. Just as in medieval European society we had the spiritual power (the priesthood), the temporal power (the nobility), the commons, and the serfs, so in ancient Indian society we had the brāhmaṇa caste (the priesthood), the kṣatriya caste (the rulers and soldiers), the vaiśya caste (the commons or merchants), and the śūdra caste (the laborers). So these four castes—represented, as it were, by the four divisions of the mandala; the common, integrated, encircled community.

And the important point that he makes about its religiousness is, as I said, that it was an experience carried down by tradition; an experience in which a priestly caste was the authority, and which had to be a common experience—just because the whole style of life in a community of this kind depended upon communication. And we can communicate with each other by virtue not only of sharing a common language, but also and more importantly by sharing a common view of the world, a common type of sensuous experience—which is, of course, why those who have the type of sensuous experiences which we call hallucinations and illusions do not fit easily into a community.

But every so often, his paper goes on to show, social cosmologies—views of the world held in common by societies—tend to break up. And actually, he starts the paper in the fifteenth century when, through the expansion of the western world through not only exploration of the surface of the globe, but greater knowledge of astronomy, begins to break up the geocentric view of the Ptolemaic universe: the view of the world under which Christianity itself had come to birth. And this he looks upon as a breaking up of the mandala: a breaking up of the communal, agreed, stable picture of the world by means of which men were able to communicate with each other—and a breaking up, therefore, which involves a disruption of all our means of communication, and a throwing of culture into a fundamental confusion.

It is perhaps, if this be true, just because of the breaking up of a unified world view and an entry into the confused world (or the relativistic world) of modern thought that the western peoples have become interested in other and former attempts to deal with life as it must be lived when the mandala, as it were, breaks up. For, after all, the idea of going beyond the communal view of the world and somehow managing to get along without it is not a new thing. And it’s very interesting that in ancient Indian society—and to some extent, even still, in modern Indian society—that when a man has done his work in society and is able to hand over his caste duties (whether they be priestly or political or professional) to his son or sons, that (as I think you all know) he, as it were, abandons the world and gives up caste, and becomes what is ordinarily called a sannyasin. We speak of that usually as “holy man,” or “hermit,” or “spiritual devotee” of some kind.

But what is a particular interest in this connection is that the abandonment of caste is also called entering into the state of vānaprastha. A vānaprastha in Sanskrit means a “forest dweller.” And in this sense the man who gives up caste—goes back, as it were—to the style of life that predates the agrarian culture. He goes, as it were, back to shamanism. And this is true not only in Indian culture, but also in Chinese, for whereas the Confucian way of life represents the community Weltanschauung—that is, what the mandala corresponds to: the enclosed, nice little, tight little world in which we feel we understand each other and understand our environment.

In China, the Taoist philosophy is the philosophy corresponding to the Indian search for liberation, or mokṣa—liberation, that is to say, from the socially conditioned view of the world. And there is evidence to show that the Taoist solitary sage has some sort of ancestral connection with the shaman. And it is possible that the words śramaṇa in Sanskrit and xiánrén in Chinese both have their origin in the term “shaman.” And the śramaṇa indicates the sannyasin, the man who has given up social life in the world. And likewise, the xiánrén in Chinese is the lonely sage in quest of immortality who has gone by himself into the mountains and the forests.

Of course, we should not suppose that the entry into the stage of vānaprastha, or the return to the forest by the Taoist sage, is in the strict sense of the word a regression. It’s no more a regression than when we speak of a wise man as one who has become again as a child. We don’t mean that he has literally become childish, that he has forgotten how to think and speak and behave in human society. And in exactly the same way, the person who enters in the stage of vānaprastha does not, as it were, become a wolf man, a sort of wild savage who runs around in the jungle naked and wears no clothes and eats his food off the ground with his teeth. He doesn’t do anything of the kind. But there’s some sort of analogy, in other words, between going back to the shaman’s religion, going back to the life of the hunter, and at the same time going beyond the place where we find ourselves in a society, where the worldview is a conditioned social pattern.

Now, in what sense and in just what way is this going beyond? And likewise, how does it apply to our own situation, where we are not, as it were, going voluntarily beyond a nice, clear, authoritative and comfortable view of the world, but rather being forced beyond it by the very pressure of events, by the uncertainty of our times, and by the confusion and instability of modern thought, which offers us no secure and humanly comfortable picture of the universe?

Well, first of all, it must be obvious that one of the things that is principally involved by a social system of communication is that it is a form of what Korzybski has called time-binding. The whole possibility of thought and language involves a codification of experience. It involves a form of thinking about life—which is basically, after all, description. Now, description is a way of coding (putting into symbols) the events that go by us. And as we begin to be able to put events into symbols, we develop most peculiar powers of memory. It becomes much easier to recollect and to formalize what has happened to us. And along with this naturally goes the ability to project our recollection into thoughts about the future course of events. And this, apparently, is something which very primitive types of human being—which are animals—do not do to any great extent.

But the price that is always paid for this ability to describe and to prefigure what is going to happen to us is that it has a very, very alarming effect upon our emotions. Because we are able, by being able to think about all sorts of future possibilities, to experience the emotions appropriate to those possibilities as if they were present happenings. In other words, the civilized Man tends to be in a state of chronic worry and fear and anxiety, because he’s always confronted not with the simple actuality of what is happening before him, but with the innumerable possibilities of what might happen. And since, because of this, his emotional existence tends to be in a chronic state of anxiety and tension, he loses increasingly the ability to relate to the concrete world as it manifests itself to him in the actual present in which he lives. He becomes so tied up inside that, as it were, the channels of his sensibility become blocked. He gets a kind of neurological sclerosis: a kind of inability to give himself, to be spontaneous, to be alive with full, joyous abandon. Thus the more civilized we become, the more stuffy we get.

And therefore, the various ways of liberating oneself from our society—of entering what the Indians call vānaprastha; the life of forest dweller going back to the forest—is when a person reaches a certain point in life when he says, “Now look here. I’ve had enough of all this. I’m simply tired of making life not in the least bit worth living by going through the horrors as to what might happen, of going through all this in the name of efficiency and membership in the community. Let me for a while get away from it all and find out what the score is for myself. I’m tired of being told what I ought to believe. I’m tired of being told how I ought to see, how I ought to behave, how I ought to feel. Let me find out for myself who I really am.” And so these institutions of going back, as it were, to the shaman state of religion—of getting away from the community interpretation of how one ought to think and feel—arise in very many great cultures of the past.

Now they arise, therefore, again today. And it’s perhaps impossible and misleading to try and have what I would call authoritative attitude about this phase of Man’s spiritual exploration. Sometimes, for example, when a person wants to find out who he really is, he goes to a psychiatrist. And occasionally he will find the kind of psychiatrist who does not have an authoritative view of what human health is, and who simply helps the individual to find his own way. Other times, unfortunately, we will find a doctrinaire psychotherapists who think they know what an integrated, healthy, and normal human being is, and who have a whole theoretic pattern of what are believed to be the actual facts of human nature, the actual design of the psyche, and they attempt (consciously or subconsciously) to wangle the patient into accepting this view.

Alternatively, we may get from the orient accounts, books about, authorities about their ways of liberation—which in many cases, however, have tended to harden into an orthodoxy and to present a traditional spiritual experience just as if they were the kind of spiritual experiences which it is the function of that social officer, the priest, to impart. And thus, when we get swamis representing an orthodox interpretation of Indian mokṣa (or liberation), or when we get even Zen masters representing perhaps an orthodox Buddhist experience, or seeming to represent one, we should be suspicious. Because these are the kind of experiences which cannot be transmitted; which, for their very nature, are something which one finds out for oneself, and which—if they could be explained, if they could be transmitted—would not be the very thing which they are intended to be. Because they are discoveries of something authentic, of something genuine, of something which is firsthand between oneself and one’s universe. And thus it’s in the nature of things that they can’t be codified; they can’t be made a factor in social communication.

And so it is that it is, in a way, fortunate that we here, in the western world, do not have too many authoritative masters and teachers to whom we feel we can now go for enlightenment. More and more of us, I think, tend to feel that we are all alone together whistling in the dark; that we haven’t a savior. There is no statesman clever enough to understand the frightful tangle of international affairs, or really to do anything very much about it. There is no psychologist or physician or philosopher who really impresses us as having the last word on everything. More and more, each one of us are thrown on our own resources. And this seems to me to be a perfectly excellent state of affairs, so that we become in a symbolic sense back in the forest—like the hunter of old who has nobody around him to tell him how he ought to feel and how he ought to use his senses, and must therefore make his own exploration and find out for himself.

But, you know, when you study the records of these self-discoverers, the fascinating thing is that there seems to be such a common measure of agreement between all those who find out for themselves. And yet, always the way in which he has to find out is not through seeking agreement with others, not trying to find what others have found, but only to find what his own senses and his own direct experience tell him when he, as it were, goes into his inner closet, goes into his own secret place, and asks for a direct encounter with the world, and no longer, as it were, looks out of the corner of his eyes to see if everybody else is doing the same thing and getting the same results. It is in this sense that a person becomes (in the truest sense of the word) a Self: an original, authoritative source of life, as distinct from a person—in its original sense: a “mask,” a “role” that he is playing in a society.