"We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about." (Campbell)
The song "Stairway to Heaven" was recorded on the Zeppelin IV album and shows the true influence of folk rock in Zeppelin's music. It also displays the impact of mythology on Robert Plant's lyrics. The song references three types of mythology: Norse, Buddhist, and Christian mythology (Songfacts). The main focus of the song is the life journey through the physical world and overcoming the temptations of the devil to reach enlightenment . Christian and Buddhist teachings are built around this ideal that a spiritually clean and moral life will help a believer overcome the temptations of the devil and allow them to move past the physical world into a heaven like state of enlightenment. The song also references a metaphysical "lady" which refers to Frigg, the wife of Oden in Norse mythology. The tree in the second verse refers to Yggdrasil, the tree of life which has its roots in hell and the tallest branches reach heaven. "There's a sign on the wall. But she wants to be sure, 'cause you know sometimes words have two meanings." (Stairway to Heaven, Plant). This verse refers to a Hindu ideal of illusion, that people have to approach with caution as to not be led down the wrong path that will keep them away from enlightenment. All these references in the song give the song a metaphorical feeling for the search to enlightenment, connecting the audience to Campbell’s third function of mythology the sociological prospect, “the validation and maintenance of an established order." (Campbell). A story with embedded morals to teach us how we should behave and what behavior is and isn’t acceptable. This song in particular tells the listener to lead a morally clean and righteous lifestyle to achieve happiness, an idea that is so elemental to the audience because it’s such an old idea that evokes people’s beliefs in good and evil (Songfacts). The message becomes particularly effective in the way the music evolves from a lonely solo voice into an energetic thematic crescendo and ends with the same lonely solo voice as if painting a picture to the listener that the lady hangs in a state of limbo neither in Heaven or Hell. Which underlines the core of Campbell’s sociological function of mythology which is "A philosophy of experience will accept at its full value the fact that social and moral existences are, like physical existences, in a state of continuous if obscure change. It will not try to cover up the fact of inevitable modification, and will make no attempt to set fixed limits to the extent of changes that are to occur." "In sum," Campbell writes, "the individual is now on his own." (Campbell).