I saw Osama bin Laden standing outside the Eaton Centre a few days ago.

He was a tall, swarthy man and wore a white turban and a long robe-like garment. I looked at him and he looked at me. He was delicate and decidedly handsome. When I stared at him, he smiled back at me. I could imagine him thinking: Yes, I know you think it's me. It's Osama bin Laden.

Of course it wasn't Osama (or at least, I don't think it was, although it's remotely possible; Toronto just might be an ideal hideout).

But my experience of seeing an Osama stand-in recalled a phrase from that great popularizer of mythology, the late Joseph Campbell.

In his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, first published in 1949, Campbell writes a marvellous sentence:

"The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change."

By this he meant that the figures of Greek mythology aren't just found in ancient plays but in the very substance of our lives and those of our neighbours and passers-by.

We live in worlds of mythology. But by mythology, Campbell did not mean make-believe. He meant the real models of human experience, the ones that are ever-present in our lives — and in our unconscious.

A monkish fervor

Campbell was born in New York, grew up Catholic and was also educated in Paris and Munich. During the Great Depression, he sat in a cabin for several years and read books on religion, psychology and mythology.

In his book, The Power of Myth, he recalls that a bookseller would mail obscure works to his woodsy retreat, knowing he had no money.

"Pay us when you can," the bookseller would write. That was the camaraderie of the Depression. It was a mythology of common sense and kindness.

While in this monkish state, full of fervor and private joy, Campbell read deeply, including the writings of James Joyce and Carl Jung.

Jung was a psychologist with a mystical bent who was deemed Freud's successor. But he broke with the great master over Jung's infatuation with religion.

Many consider Jung the greater psychologist because his depth encompassed a more expansive range than Freud. Freud was dark and obsessed with sex and death. Jung gave us the hope that our lives were made of something more than pathology. We live lives connected to cosmic rhythms, he surmised. We are hungry, meaning-seeking creatures on a brief earthly voyage.

These points Campbell made to the American journalist Bill Moyers in his television series, The Power of Myth, in 1988. Moyers was a former Bible student who displayed that hunger for meaning in his journalism, the sort that Campbell could supply. His sessions with Moyers were extraordinary events and for years they were replayed during PBS subscription drives.

Campbell's great insight was that we are all on a mythological quest. We look to heroes who exhibit lives of great daring and significance, ones we dare not undertake for ourselves. And we learn from these heroes when they return from their dangerous voyages.

They are, in a very real sense, our ambassadors to the world of larger meaning. They bring us messages from the universe.

And we try, in our slight way, to imitate them.

A paucity of heroes

Unfortunately, we do not have a surplus of heroes to imitate today. In the West, the media coughs up movie and rock stars, athletes, vigilantes and outlaws. They hint at a god-like status, but their lives are often the stuff of seedy gossip.

Then there is the matter of one nation's hero being another's sinner. A big part of the Muslim world is in love with Osama bin Laden, the man who defies America, which he refers to as the Great Satan. Bin Laden wants to restore the lost dignity of a beleaguered people, with the right application of terror (plus the added bonus of 72 virgins in heaven for his adherents).

Bin Laden is a hero to many. And his face is stencilled on T-shirts in developing countries.

Which takes me back to Osama bin Laden, loitering at Yonge and Dundas streets in Toronto.

There he was, a slim man who could be 30 or 40, smiling at me, knowing I knew what he was up to. He had transformed himself into somebody else: Glamorous and lethal. But he was not playing at being a thug, a violent hockey player or a bad-ass hip hop star. His hero was a killer with exquisite manners, with long, delicate fingers. His bin Laden was the most cultivated of outlaws.

What we imitate we hope to become: that's the nature of culture and mythology, as Campbell understood it. A world full of Osamas stands on corners in places across the globe, smiling. When people say George W. Bush's War on Terror is a war of ideas, they are terrifyingly right.

No doubt Campbell could make sense of bin Laden if Campbell were alive today (he died in 1987). He saw dictators as mythic phantoms, projections of our dark fantasies. But he also might be aghast at the shrinkage of true heroism today, right across our Western culture.

Seeing the ghostly grin of Osama bin Laden in downtown Toronto, I realized that mythology has the power to startle and provoke in the unlikeliest of places. And I wondered who his mythic counterparts might be on the busy intersections of Baghdad or Tehran or Paris for that matter.

It also made me wonder who my heroes are and I could not come up with any right away. I need Campbell's mythology as much as the rest of the world. Then I got on the subway.

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