The Vedic Roots of Joseph Campbell’s Dance of Eternity and Time

By Gabriel Hartley, March 20, 2019

Early on in his exposition of the Hero’s Journey in The Hero with a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell writes the following curious statement: “[T]he hero as the incarnation of god is himself the navel or axis of the world, the umbilical point through which the energies of eternity break into time” (38). While there is much here for the reader to parse out—what, for instance, does Campbell mean when he speaks of the hero as the incarnation of god?—the part of the sentence that immediately spoke to me and which I wish to unravel here is the idea that “the energies of eternity break into time.” This potent opposition of eternity and time is clearly not static but involves a breaking into. And it is not simply eternity itself (whatever that might be) but the energies of eternity that are breaking into time. This is the explosive moment of the opening out from the Ego of the Initiate, whether on a personal microcosmic scale (the Hero’s Journey) or on a collective macrocosmic scale (the cosmogonic fate of civilizations).

What Campbell is giving us is a way of meditating on and engaging with what he sees as perhaps the most foundational moment in human experience: that moment when these two oppositional modes of experience and comprehension inflect one another and stage the dynamism of their apparent opposition throughout all modes of human expression as it resolves back into the ultimate unity beyond opposition itself. The relationship between eternity and time, this at once delicate and frantic dance of incommensurate yet unified dimensions, stages for us the prototype of all other interdimensional relationships. And the hero of any narrative, Campbell tells us, is the pivot-point, the navel, the avatar axis of the world wherein—as in the umbilical point of connection between mother and child in gestation—humans come to see who they might be and how they might fit into this universe which, as we see, is in fact a conjunction of vastly differing universes of universal experience. In this way, the hero is the incarnation of god, and we, each of us in our own heroic rounds, are the various manifestations and interpolations of this avataristic being who bridges eternity and time.

It is especially fitting that Campbell refer to this paradigmatic moment as the “paradox of creation.” It is in this life, this created state of being, marked from the very beginning by suffering (or so the Buddha tells us), that we initially experience the energies of eternity as an assault of sorts, a breaking into this otherwise unconscious round of blooming and corruption, as a call to awakening or annihilation—both of which in the end might lead to the same thing, the awakening annihilation of the Ego in the Self.

Campbell writes:

The paradox of creation, the coming of the forms of time out of eternity, is the germinal secret of the father. It can never be quite explained. Therefore, in every system of theology there is an umbilical point, an Achilles tendon which the finger of mother life has touched, and where the possibility of perfect knowledge has been impaired. The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point; to shatter and annihilate that key knot of his limited existence. (135/124-25/147)

At the heart of Campbell’s adventure of the soul, then, is an emphasis on a primal, universal awareness of—enactment of—our condition of Unity in Opposition. But for us to see this ultimate Unity, we as time-bound beings must break out of the Illusion of Separation that marks all human consciousness, the immersion in separation that expresses itself as a fundamental perspective that divides all conscious existence into various forms of Duality. The goal of initiation, the end of the Hero’s Journey, involves the recognition of the ultimate interconnected reality beyond duality. “The hero, the waker of his own soul,” Campbell explains, “is himself but the convenient means of his own dissolution” (241/223).

Such a perspective is perhaps most coherently and extensively expressed in the Hindu philosophy known as Advaita Vedanta. The term “Advaita” acts as the basis of this entire system. The Sanskrit term “dvaita” means “dual.” This is the basic sense of reality underlying all dualisms. In the context of Vedanta, the ultimate dualism is the separation of Self (Atman) from the Godhead or ultimate metaphysical Reality (Brahman). From this perspective, we are forever separate from the ultimate Divine source of all existence. But with the addition of the negating prefix “a” we have a-dvaita or nondual, the recognition that duality resolves itself into cosmic unity.

We see here again, then, the hero as the pivot-point, the act of self-sacrifice in which ego and world are shattered and released into the Being-Consciousness-Bliss of satchitananda. In a volume of writings by Heinrich Zimmer edited by Campbell in the years following Zimmer’s death we read:

The fundamental thought of Advaita Vedanta is that the life-monad or soul (jiva) is in essence the Self (atman), which, being beyond the changing, transient, phenomenal apparitions of our empirical experience, is none other than Brahman, the sole and universal Eternal Reality, which is beyond change, self-effulgent and ever free, and defined as “one-with-out-a-second” (a-dvitiya), “really existing” (sat), “purely spiritual” (cit) and “sheer bliss” (ananda). The life-monad is in error about its own true character. It regards itself as bound. But this error vanishes with the dawn of realization. The life-monad (jiva) then discovers that it is itself the Self (atman). Bondage thereupon is non-existent. Indeed, with reference to that which is always free such terms as bondage and liberation are inappropriate. They seem to have meaning only during the preliminary stages of spiritual apprenticeship, when the pupil has still to make the critical discovery. The term “liberation” is used by the guru only in a preliminary sense, as addressed to one in a state of bondage that exists only in his own imagination. (Philosophies of India 456)

            Campbell time and again leads us through the archetypal dualisms that structure our phenomenal existence as beings in time: Eternity vs. Time; Heaven vs. Earth; Father vs. Mother; Male vs. Female; Death vs. Life; Conscious vs. Unconscious; Reality vs. Dream; Yab vs. Yum; Yang vs. Yin; Light vs. Dark; Absolute vs. Manifest; Bliss vs. Suffering; Nirvana vs. Illusion; Transcendent vs. Experiential; Self vs. Ego; Cosmogony vs. Journey; Ineffable vs. Material; Macrocosm vs. Microcosm; and on and on. But ultimately, what “is understood is that time and eternity are two aspects of the same experience-whole, two planes of the same nondual ineffable; i.e., the jewel of eternity is in the lotus of birth and death: om mani padme hum” (152). And perhaps “the most eloquent possible symbol of this mystery is that of the god crucified”: “God assumes the life of man and man releases the God within himself at the mid-point of the cross-arms of the same ‘coincidence of opposites,’ the same sun door through which God descends and Man ascends—each as the other’s food” (241-42, emphasis mine). Shattering; annihilating; piercing balancing; transcending; journeying; falling into; dissolving boundaries; transfiguring the world—these are the actions of the initiate Heroes who have passed through the sun door and have thereby consumed themselves in the eternal flash of awakening. As the broken God on the cross, the Hero embodies the nexus of interdimensional transition: the axis, hub, threshold, navel, sundoor, cross, dome, womb—the very hero herself. And these actions unfold at the topographical sites of the four directions, the hills and groves, the tree of life, the loci of heroic and sacred events, and within the sacred architectures of the labyrinth, shrine, temple, and dome—all those points at which, when experienced through the moment of annihilation of Self, the opposition of here and there falls in on itself like the snake swallowing its tail into the other side of nothingness, the pinhole in the fabric of existence through which we are turned inside out in such a way that both inside and outside are mutually annulled.

            Campbell leads us in and out of these sites as follows:

The dome of heaven rests on the quarters of the earth, sometimes supported by four caryatidal kings, dwarfs, giants, elephants, or turtles. Hence, the traditional importance of the mathematical problem of the quadrature of the circle: it contains the secret of the transformation of heavenly into earthly forms. The hearth in the home, the altar in the temple, is the hub of the wheel of the earth, the womb of the Universal Mother whose fire is the fire of life. And the opening at the top of the lodge—or the crown, pinnacle, or lantern, of the dome—is the hub or midpoint of the sky: the sun door, through which souls pass back from time to eternity, like the savor of the offerings, burned in the fire of life, and lifted on the axis of ascending smoke from the hub of the earthly to that of the celestial wheel. (39, emphasis again mine)

Campbell’s note to this curious passage takes us to an essay published in 1938 by his friend and colleague in comparative perennial hero studies, Ananda Coomaraswamy. In this lengthy essay, entitled “Symbolism of the Dome,” Coomaraswamy develops the symbolism of the sundoor, the primal portal manifesting the coincidence for the initiate of this realm of worldly experience and eternal cosmic wisdom in the realm beyond all that lies beneath the vault of heaven—our experience of the coincidence of eternity in the world of time. The initiate seeks “that goal which lies beyond the Sun, and which is usually described as reached by a passing through the midst of the Sun” (445). In his essay “Symplegades” (1947) Coomaraswamy writes:

The door as an obstacle is the “barricade of the sky” [. . .], which divides the world of mortality under the Sun from the world of immortality beyond him; the Sundoor is the “Gateway of Truth” [. . .],, and as such “a forwarding for the wise and a barrier to the foolish” [. . .]. [Coomaraswamy 524-25, note 10]

And in the essay “Svayamatrnna: Janua Coeli” Coomaraswamy writes, “Whoever has thus not only been born but born again after repeated deaths and is duly ‘qualified to pass through the midst of the Sun’ [. . .] has either virtually broken out of the cosmos while still in the flesh or will for the last time be reborn at death, so as to be ‘altogether liberated through the midst of the Sun’” (Coomaraswamy467-69).

Liberated through the midst of the Sun: this is the primal image characterizing Campbell’s dance of eternity and time. We must pass through the pinhole center of the Sun, which itself perforates the sky above us, turning ourselves inside out on the other side of the heavenly dome so as to reveal to consciousness the eternal fact that the heavens have been within us all along. It is in exactly this experience that we reveal to ourselves that we are the avatars, the incarnations of god, who was nowhere else but within us all along. As Coomaraswamy puts it:

The whole intention of the Vedic tradition and of the sacrifice is to define the Way (mārga) by which the aspirant (here in the literal sense of “upbreather” rather than the psychological sense of one who has mere ambition) can ascend these worlds and escape altogether through the midst of the Sun, thus crossing over from mortality to immortality. Like all other “passages,” this passing over is at the same time a death and a rebirth (regeneration), and equally so whether the “death” be sacrificial and initiatory (in which case a return to life is provided for in the ritual) or that real death following which is laid on the funeral pyre and “reaches the Sun, the world door, as quickly as one could direct the mind to Him.”  (Coomaraswamy 470)

It is in this way that the Hero’s Journey gives way to (or manifests in the particular) the universal Cosmogonic Cycle underlying all mythic consciousness. “The Cosmogonic Cycle,” Campbell explains, “unrolls the great vision of the creation and destruction of the world which is vouchsafed as revelation to the successful hero” (Hero 38). In prototypical vedic-neoplatonic fashion, this cycle is marked by the stages of emanation, birth, transformation, and dissolution (each stage serving as a unit of the second half of Campbell’s Hero book).

The cosmogonic cycle is presented with astonishing consistency in the sacred writings of all the continents, and it gives to the adventure of the hero a new and interesting turn; for now it appears that the perilous journey was a labor not of attainment but of reattainment, not discovery but rediscovery. The godly powers sought and dangerously won are revealed to have been within the heart of the hero all the time. [. . .] From this point of view the hero is symbolical of that divine creative and redemptive image which is hidden within us all, only waiting to be known and rendered into life. (Hero 36)

In his book The Dance of Shiva Coomaraswamy writes, “We have already indicated that this [Science of the Self] recognizes the unity of all life—one source, one essence, and one goal—and regards the realization of this unity as the highest good, bliss, salvation, freedom, the final purpose of life. This is for Hindu thinkers eternal life; not an eternity in time, but the recognition here and now of All Things in the Self and the Self in All” (7). This dance of eternity and time lies at the heart of Zimmer’s study of the Shri Yantra, which, according to Zimmer, though “apparently no more than a geometrical device, [. . .] is conceived and designed as a support to meditation—more precisely, to a concentrated visualization and intimate inner experience of the polar play and logic-shattering paradox of eternity and time” (Myths and Symbols 140). “Here,” Zimmer adds, “God and Creature are consubstantial, Eternity and Life one and the same” (199).

The Biblical version of the creation myth, Campbell asserts, “represents one of the basic ways of symbolizing the mystery of creation: the devolvement of eternity into time, the breaking of the one into the two and then the many, as well as the generation of new life through the reconjunction of the two. This image stands at the beginning of the cosmogonic cycle, and with equal propriety at the conclusion of the hero-task, at the moment when the wall of Paradise is dissolved, the divine form found and recollected, and wisdom regained” (Hero 141-42).

The passage through the sundoor leading to the falling off of the forms of duality presents Campbell with a key for resolving even the most resistant of dualisms. One of those resistant forms of opposition hardest to crack for our own cultural-historical moment is the opposition of the sexes. And yet even this dualism, when drawn through the transformative flames of the sundoor, gives way to wisdom beyond time:

For in the language of the divine pictures, the world of time is the great mother womb. The life therein, begotten by the father, is compounded of her darkness and his light. We are conceived in her and dwell removed from the father, but when we pass from the womb of time at death (which is our birth to eternity) we are given into his hands. The wise realize, even within this womb, that they have come from and are returning to the father; while the very wise know that she and he are in substance one. (Hero 156-57)

“This is a supreme statement,” Campbell continues, “of the great paradox by which the wall of the pairs of opposites is shattered and the candidate admitted to the vision of the God, who when he created man in his own image created him male and female” (158). At this mystical moment, the “very wise” give birth to the fusion of the sexes that allows the hero to function “as the incarnation of god” which is forever beyond sexuation, beyond all forms of time-bound duality. In the words of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, this is the moment of unity within which we can no longer tell “the dancer from the dance.” “Man in the world of action loses his centering in the principle of eternity if he is anxious for the outcome of his deeds, but resting them and their fruits on the knees of the Living God he is released by them, as by a sacrifice, from the bondages of the sea of death” (Hero 221). Even the forms of the gods, which in their isolation maintain the distance between humanity and the divine (just as the gendering of language does), must give way to this vision of ultimate unity: “The gods come into existence with the dawn of the world and dissolve with the twilight” (242). “[T]he universal doctrine teaches that all the visible structures of the world—all things and beings—are the effects of a ubiquitous power out of which they rise, which supports and fills them during the period of their manifestation, and back into which they must ultimately dissolve” (239).

Towards the end of the movie Sukhavati we hear one of Campbell’s most profound statements growing out of what such a vision of this ultimate unity provides:

Chief Seattle in another of his words said, “Why should I lament the disappearance of my people? All things die. The white race will find this out, too.” So yield to what is coming. We’re in a free fall into future. We don’t know where we are going. Things are changing so fast and always when you are going through a long tunnel anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting shift in perspective, and that’s all it is. Joyful participation in the sorrows, and everything changes.

            The birth of Buddhist wisdom lies within the recognition that underneath all of existence lies the experience of suffering, of dukkha, of separation from the ultimate source which Siddhartha perceived with the rising of the morning star, his own sundoor perforation of phenomenal existence revealing that there is ultimately nothing to be attained because we are already one. Joyful participation in the sorrows, and everything changes. And when one of the forms of time that we so depend upon dissolves before us—the traditional mysteries that structured our modes of apprehension of this ultimate unity—we can only search through those mysteries that remain:

Man is that alien presence with whom the forces of egoism must come to terms, through whom the ego is to be crucified and resurrected, and in whose image society is to be reformed. Man, understood however not as “I” but as “Thou”: for the ideals and temporal institutions of no tribe, race, continent, social class, or century, can be the measure of the inexhaustible and multifariously wonderful divine existence that is the life in all of us. (361-62)

“It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero,” Campbell says as he concludes his hero book, “but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal—carries the cross of the redeemer—not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair” (362). Joyful participation in those silences, and everything changes.

Sources

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press commemorative edition, 2004. Print.

——. Sukhavati: A Mythic Journey. Produced, directed, and edited by Maxine Harris and Sheldon Rochlin. Joseph Campbell Foundation, 2005. DVD.

Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy: Selected Papers vol. I: Traditional Art and Symbolism. Edited by Roger Lipsey. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Print.

——. The Dance of Shiva: Fourteen Indian Essays. New York: The Sunwise Turn, Inc. 1918. Print.

Zimmer, Heinrich. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. Edited by Joseph Campbell. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946. Print.

——. Philosophies of India. Edited by Joseph Campbell. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952. Print.