Editor’s Foreword

“Tat tvam asi” is a phrase that appears often in these collected spiritual reflections of the late Joseph Campbell. These words also inscribe a signature of celebration on his life and work. Translated from the Sanskrit as “thou art that,” this epigram captures Campbell’s generous spirit just as it does his scholarly focus. The great student of mythology not only understood the profound spiritual implications of the phrase but, quite unselfconsciously, lived by them as well.

Joseph Campbell was fond of asking Schopenhauer’s question, found in his essay “On the Foundations of Morality”: “How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it moves me to action?...This is something really mysterious, something for which Reason can provide no explanation, and for which no basis can be found in practical experience. It is not unknown even to the most hard-hearted and self-interested. Examples appear every day before our eyes of instant responses of the kind, without reflection, one person helping another, coming to his aid, even setting his own life in clear danger for someone whom he has seen for the first time, having nothing more in mind than that the other is in need and in peril of his life....”[1]

Schopenhauer’s response, one Campbell delighted in making his own, was that the immediate reaction and response represented the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization best rendered as “thou art that.”[2] This pre-supposes, as the German philosopher wrote, his identification with someone not himself, a penetration of the barrier between persons so that the other was no longer perceived as an indifferent stranger but as a person “in whom I suffer, in spite of the fact that his skin does not enfold my nerves.”[3]

This fundamental insight, as Schopenhauer continued, reveals that “my own true inner being actually exists in every living creature...[and] is the ground of that compassion (Mitleid) upon which all true, that is to say, unselfish, virtue rests and whose expression is in every good deed.”[4]

Joseph Campbell was not only moved by compassion in his personal relationships, as anybody who ever heard him speak or reads his works can easily sense, but he also grasped that this spiritual realization was central to understanding the metaphorical language through which both mythology and religion, whose images and energy flow from a common source in human imagination, express themselves. “The metaphors of any mythology,” as he wrote, “may be defined as affect signs derived from intuitions of just this play of the Self through all the forms of a local manner of life, made manifest through ritualized representations, pedagogical narratives, prayers, meditations, annual festivals, and the like, in such a way that all members of the relevant community may be held, both in mind and in sentiment, to its knowledge and thus moved to live in accord.”[5]

For Campbell, mythology was, in a sense, the powerful cathedral organ through which the tonal resonations of a hundred separate pipes were fused into the same extraordinary music. What was common in these multiplied themes was their human origin, as if each were a vessel of the same eternal cry of the spirit, inflected in extraordinary and dazzling variations, in the field of time. We men and women find ourselves in the creative expressions of our human longings, aspirations, and tragedies of our own particular tradition. Indeed, so f