I first got into Joseph Campbell when I wrote a paper in eighth grade for my English class about how Star Wars was modern mythology. I didn’t know who Campbell was until my teacher read that paper, handed it back to me, and told me I should go out and read him. And read him I did. Spent much of the rest of highschool reading through his work, and expanding into other writers of comparative religion and mythology.

And here I am now. Campbell is pretty much behind me now. At the time, he sort of dropped an atom bomb into my mind, shook everything up and mutated it all together into one great big monster who’s been rampaging ever since. And I thank him for that. Mostly when I try to read him now though, I get a little bored, just because the novelty’s pretty much worn off.

But I do think he was an absolute genius. In more ways than most people realize. I personally think he had one real master-stroke. I’ve wondered before why Campbell didn’t talk more about “pop culture as mythology”. I mean, he did, but it wasn’t the focus of his work. I only realized very recently the sleight of hand that he really pulled. What he did was use pop culture as a vehicle. I think he realized that traditional religions were essentially dead in the water, or if not dead then at least declining in people’s lives. Certainly they still play a role, but nowadays the real grunt-work is done by pop culture. It provides us with a story-system which binds us as a culture, and which acts as a vehicle or vessel for the symbolic contents of our subconscious minds.

I think he realized this, but he also realized that there was a danger here. Namely, that our archetypes were being clothed in pop culture, and we didn’t even know it. Since it was happening mostly outside the context of organized religion, with traditions of ritual and symbolism, most people were missing out on the important lessons learned in those traditions. So what he did, the real genius of his work, was to strip out the symbolic messages out of all world religions, and inject them directly into the bloodstream of the new religion, pop culture. And he essentially trusted that through the chaos of the mediasphere, these messages would ultimately find their place on their own and go right to where they were needed.

And I think largely he was right. Although we could more than likely use another infusion of the same nowadays. The way he accomplished the above, I think, is largely summed up in this quote:

Read other people’s myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts — but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message.”

So he made a semiotic distinction between religion and mythology, because he realized there was a cultural bias that needed to be explicitly addressed and overcome, and he gave a simple method for doing so. Essentially, he said we’re not able to objectively look at ourselves. So let’s start by looking at each other. And then we can work our way inward. It’s really genius in it’s simplicity, I think.

Anyway, I’ve been looking at Campbell again in relation to some of the ideas I’m trying to figure out lately. Namely in relation to the occult/conspiracy theory. And just what it is that people nowadays are really trying to do with it all. I tend to see conspiracy theory especially as an unconscious attempt by people to mythologize the media, current events and pop culture. I think for most people today, pop culture really does stand in place of traditional religion. And this is both good and bad. Good because it promotes change and development and individual choice, but bad because it’s a new spiritual discipline and as such the pitfalls are many and dangerous - especially if you don’t understand the symbolic landscape you’re moving into.

I found an article a while ago about how some religious people are trying desperately to basically “repackage” traditional religious concepts to look like pop culture - because they are losing so much ground to the more hip, modern way pop culture works. A quote from that article has somebody speaking against this trend to repackage religion:

They mostly redefine religion in consumerist terms. ‘We want to sell you our product.’ It signals a shift from the authority of the religious tradition to the individual consumer as the authority.

Without having realized it probably, I think this person has simply and elegantly summarized exactly what’s happening in modern religion right now - and by modern religion, I mean pop culture. A lot of counter-cultural types (myself included, at times) like to go off about how consumerism is such a destructive mentality in some ways. And while I think that’s true, I think this whole built-in angle where individual choice is glamorized is really compelling. Certainly your most profound expression of individual choice usually breaks down in pop culture to buy Pepsi or Coke. But I think this almost gnostic insistence on the “individual consumer as the authority” is the key to undoing the whole mess.

And this is exactly what I think conspiracy theory is such an excellent example of. Conspiracists have an almost Protestant refusal to engage in the official systems of worship and theology promulgated by the Church of the Media (Hollywood as the New Rome). They are asserting their “individual consumer as the authority” system of ethics which they learned from intense consumerist indoctrination. And they are realizing that worldviews, reality tunnels, media channels are all just products being sold. And as a consumer, you’re supposed to pick and choose what you like, what appeals to your instincts and fits your identity as an individual.

And for their exemplary performance as the ultimate information consumers, they are rewarded with nothing but scorn by the media, because their Protestant “priesthood of all believers”, their reality-tunnel Liberation Theology, threatens the very structure of the Media-Church institutions themselves. As the strength of choice of the individual consumer ascends, the strength of the religious tradition declines.

Admittedly, conspiracy theorists fall into traps not exclusively because of negative portrayal in the media. It’s also an inherent danger in carving out your own spiritual path. Since you’re moving radically outside the bounds of what you know, and you’re not familiar with the spiritual landscape, you end up stumbling in the dark. In this sense, Joseph Campbell’s tactics seem especially useful and relevant. He figured out a way to provide people immersed in the pop culture religion to sync back up with the wisdom traditions of mankind, while still moving forward. I’d like to see a Joseph Campbell of Conspiracy Theory rise up as well, to help those people who are out there moving on the vanguards. Give them the ability to not only consciously realize what they are doing, but give them the unconscious symbolic knowledge of human archetypal history so that their quest to carve out a new mythology, a new spirituality, a new “MonoConspiracy” (or: The Conspiracy Theory With a Thousand Faces) is not just a reaction to what’s come before, but a building forward on the foundations of the old.