The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god. (50)
Joseph CampbellOne of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn’t continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.
Joseph CampbellSometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That’s an image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. The serpent represents immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again. There is something tremendously terrifying about life when you look at it that way. And so the serpent carries in itself the sense of both the fascination and the terror of life.
Joseph CampbellThe importance of the End of time is as ... a psychological event ... When you have seen the radiance of eternity through all the forms of time ... and it is the function of art to make that visible to you ... then you have really have ended life in the world as it is lived by those who only think only in the historical, concretizing terms. This is the function of mythology.
Joseph CampbellOne cannot predict the next mythology any more than one can predict tonight's dream; for a mythology is not an ideology. It is not something projected from the brain, but something experienced from the heart, from recognition of identities behind or within the appearances of nature, perceiving with love a 'thou' where there would otherwise have been only an 'it.'
Joseph Campbell