Lesson 2 – Part 2: The First Storytellers
Original journal entry from May 31, 2025 (edited June 20, 2025) – Response to Lesson 2: The First Storytellers (transcript version). This was my reflection after switching to the written transcript of the Joseph Campbell interview, exploring myths as guides for accepting life's cycles, rituals around death, and connections to biblical stories of sacrifice.
In this interview of Joseph Campbell by Bill Moyers, Campbell explains how communities and societies use myths to shape people’s understanding of birth, growing up and growing old, and finally death. He explains how ancient storytelling is designed to help us accept that this is the natural way of how life works. Storytelling is the way humans have been explaining and understanding the direction that life takes since the beginning. We want to make sense of it all and have an explanation for what happens after death. We want life to continue beyond the natural process. And we create and perform rituals around those explanations because we want to believe that there is still more after death. At the same time, myths are meant to help our minds harmonize with and accept nature’s way. The myths are like messages from those who have already gone through the various sections of the journey that we are about to experience.
Campbell and Moyers then go on in more depth about how both humans and animals witness each other’s deaths and how the way we have buried each other speaks of what we believe about death and the afterlife. There is a belief that although the body has died, the person continues to live on. The same with animals, while one has died in body, it lives on in spirit. Campbell explains how this is the basis for all mythology and that this is the intersection where we discover that there is another plane of existence, outside of the physical realm. And depending on the situation or the perspective of the observer this unseen realm is either the one supporting our physical realm or the physical realm is the one supporting the unseen realm. Which realm is more real?
Campbell continues to reveal how the death of the animals at the hands of human hunters is a relationship. The stories and the myths declare how the animal gives itself up for the hunter, for the humans, as nourishment, and as it dies it gets taken up into the realm from where it came. This is where the ritual takes place, where the human creates a process of receiving what the animal gives. The human thanks the animal for giving itself up for the sustenance of the human. A ceremony of honoring the life that was given. We could compare this ritual to the way people pray to God, giving Him thanks for the meal they are about to consume. Moyers interjects here exclaiming that this is essentially worship.
This makes me think of the story in the Bible where Abraham nearly sacrificed his son, Isaac, and a ram got stuck by its horns in some nearby bushes -it replaced Isaac as the sacrifice. And Abraham declared that God provided the ram for the sacrifice. From that story came one of the names of God, Jehovah-jireh, which means God provides or God is my Provider in Hebrew.
While the animal is seen as a lower life form that is used for nourishment, it becomes the more powerful creature when it is given control over becoming the one who provides itself to the human as nourishment. This is how the ritual and the ceremony and the worship of the animal becomes part of the culture and the history of a community.
Umalohókan
House of Twin Suns
TM: Carlos Martinez
"You don't have to see the whole staircase just to take the first step."
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Last edit: 20 Jun 2025 20:26 by Yelt97 IPTC
Looking back now: This entry deepened my appreciation for how myths and rituals help us face mortality and find meaning in sacrifice. Connecting Campbell's ideas to Abraham's story and modern gratitude prayers felt like a bridge between ancient wisdom and my own faith background.