SOURCE: Doty, William G. “Joseph Campbell's Myth and/Versus Religion.” Soundings 79, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 1996): 421-45.

In the following essay, Doty discusses “some of the religious aspects of Campbell's myth-work, and his way of talking about myths as potent cultural forces.”

Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.

—J. Campbell (1988b, 5)¹

The logic of myth claims that there is always, no matter how it is disguised, qualified, or suppressed, a “hidden connection” or “inner law” linking chaos and cosmos, nature and culture.

Religion exists as a kind of sum of all other cultural systems to say that [the] ambiguities, the felt chaos of life, has meaning because it is interpretable. It is part of the larger fictional story—the myth—or the permanent cosmological structures of reality.

—N. J. Girardot (1983, 3, 7)²

What Norman Girardot calls the mythic logic undergirding the hidden connection of things is for...