Your biology is related to the biology of plants and animals: they too share the life energies – what we might term “body wisdom,” in contrast to mental wisdom. When you move deeper in dream, when you move into the sphere of the permanent energies of your body, your mental wisdom is gradually extinguished, body wisdom (as it were) rises, and you experience the collective order of dream, where the imagery is identical to the imagery of myth. And since some of these images have not been allowed to play a role in your life, you come into relation to them with surprise.
-- Mythic Worlds, Modern Words
A dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.
-- Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers
Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations.
-- The Masks of God™ Volume 1: Primitive Mythology
For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are the spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.
-- The Hero with a Thousand Faces
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