The Power of Myth reading

The Power Of Myth, by Bill Moyers, a discussion with Joseph Campbell
  episode 1, TRANSCRIPT excerpts

 “We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. And where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”—Joseph Campbell

BILL MOYERS: Joseph Campbell believed that everything begins with a story, so we begin this series with Joseph Campbell with one of his favorites. He was in Japan for a conference on religion, and he overheard another American delegate, a social philosopher from New York, say to a Shinto priest, “We’ve been now to a good many ceremonies and have seen quite a few of your shrines. But I don’t get your ideology, I don’t get your theology.” The Japanese paused as though in deep thought, and then slowly shook his head. “I think we don’t have ideology,” he said, “we don’t have theology. We dance.”

Campbell could have said it of his own life. When he died in 1987 at the age of 83, he was considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on mythology, the stories and legends told by human beings through the ages to explain the universe and their place in it. The 20 books he wrote or edited have influenced artists and performers, as well as scholars and students. When he died, he was working on a monumental Historical Atlas of World Mythology, his effort to bring under one roof the spiritual and intellectual wisdom of a lifetime.

Some of his books are classics: The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which established his fame 40 years ago; and his four-volume study of mythology, The Masks of God. Joseph Campbell was one of the most spiritual men I ever met, but he didn’t have an ideology or a theology. Mythology was to him the song of the universe, music so deeply embedded in our collective unconscious that we dance to it, even when we can’t name the tune. Over the last two summers of his life, we taped these conversations in California, at Skywalker Ranch, the home of his friend, George Lucas, whose movie trilogy Star Wars had been influenced by Campbell’s work. We talked about the message and meaning of myth, about the first storytellers, about love and marriage, gods and goddesses, religion, ritual, art and psychology. But we always came around to his favorite subject, the hero with a thousand faces. Why the hero with a thousand faces?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, because there is a certain typical hero sequence of actions, which can be detected in stories from all over the world, and from many, many periods of history. And I think it’s essentially, you might say, the one deed done by many, many different people.

BILL MOYERS: Why are there so many stories of the hero or of heroes in mythology?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, because that’s what’s worth writing about. I mean, even in popular novel writing, you see, the main character is the hero or heroine, that is to say, someone who has found or achieved or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero properly is someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself or other than himself.

BILL MOYERS: So in all of these cultures, whatever the costume the hero might be wearing, what is the deed?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, there are two types of deed. One is the physical deed; the hero who has performed a war act or a physical act of heroism in saving a life, that’s a hero act. Giving himself, sacrificing himself to another. And the other kind is the spiritual hero, who has learned or found a mode of experiencing the supernormal range of human spiritual life, and then come back and communicated it. It’s a cycle, it’s a going and a return, that the hero cycle represents.

But then this can be seen also in the simple initiation ritual, where a child has to give up his childhood and become an adult, has to die, you might say, to his infantile personality and psyche and come back as a self-responsible adult. It’s a fundamental experience that everyone has to undergo, in our childhood for at least 14 years, and then to get out of that posture of dependency, psychological dependency, into one of psychological self-responsibility, requires a death and resurrection, and that is the basic motif of the hero journey, Leaving one condition, finding the source of life to bring you forth in a richer or more mature or other condition.

BILL MOYERS: So that if we happen not to be heroes in the grand sense of redeeming society, we have to lake that journey ourselves, spiritually, psychologically, inside us.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s right. And Otto Rank, in his wonderful, very short book called The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, he says that everyone is a hero in his birth. He has undergone a tremendous transformation from a little, you might say, water creature. living in a realm of the amniotic fluid and so forth, then coming out, becoming an air-breathing mammal that ultimately will be self-standing and so forth, is an enormous transformation and it is a heroic act, and it’s a heroic act on the mother’s part to bring it about. It’s the primary hero, hero form, you might say.

BILL MOYERS: Do these stories of the hero vary from culture to culture?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, it’s the degree of illumination or action that makes them different. There is a typical early-culture hero who goes around slaying monsters. Now, that is in the period of history when man is shaping his world out of a wild, savage, unshaped world. Well, it has another shape, but it’s not the shape for man. He goes around killing monsters.

BILL MOYERS: So the hero evolves over time, like most other concepts and ideas and adventures.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the evolves as the culture evolves. Now, Moses is a hero figure in his ascent of the mountain, his meeting with Yahweh on the summit of the mountain, and coming back with the rules for the formation of a whole new society. That’s the hero act. Departure, fulfillment, return. And on the way there are adventures that can be paralleled also in other traditions.

Now, the Buddha figure is like that of the Christ; of course, 500 years earlier. You could match those two traditions right down the line, even to the characters of their apostles, of their monks, Christ, now, there’s a perfectly good hero deed formula represented there, and he undergoes three temptations: the economic temptation, where the devil says, “You look hungry, young man; change the stones to bread,” Jesus said, “Man lives not by bread alone, but every word from the mouth of God.” Next, we have the political temptation: he’s taken to the top of a mountain and shown the nations of the world, and says, “You can come into control of all these if you’ll bow to me.” And then, “Now, you’re so spiritual, let’s go up to the top of Herod’s temple and see you cast yourself down, and God will bear you up and you won’t even bruise your heels.” So he says, “You shall not tempt the Lord your God.” Those are the three temptations of Christ. In the desert.

The Buddha also goes into the forest, has conferences with the leading gurus of the day, he goes past them, He comes to the bo tree, the Tree of Illumination, undergoes three temptations. They’re not the same temptations, but they are three temptations, And One is that of lust another is that of fear, and another is that of social duty, doing what you’re told. And then both of these men come back, and they choose disciples, who help them establish a new way of consciousness in terms of what they have discovered there. These are the same hero deeds; these are the spiritual hero deeds ñ the Moses, the Buddha, Christ, Mohammed.

Mohammed literally, and we know this about him, he was a camel caravan master. But he would leave his home and go out into a little mountain cave that he found and meditate, and meditate, and meditate and meditate. And one day a voice says, “Write,” and we have the Koran, you know. It’s an old story.

BILL MOYERS: Sometimes it seems to me that we ought to feel pity for the hero instead of admiration, So many of them have sacrificed their own needs.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: They all have.

BILL MOYERS: And very often what they accomplish is shattered by the inability of the followers to see.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes. They come out of the forest with gold and it turns to ashes, That’s another motif that occurs.

BILL MOYERS: In this culture of easy religion cheaply achieved, it seems to me we’ve forgotten that all three of the great religions teach that the trials of the hero journey are a significant part of it, that there’s no reward without renunciation and without a price, The Koran speaks, “Do you think that you shall enter the garden of bliss without such trials as come to those who passed before you?”

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BILL MOYERS: Does a movie like Star Wars fill some of that need for the spiritual adventure, for the hero?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Oh, perfect, it does the cycle perfectly. It’s not simple morality play. It has to do with the powers of life and their inflection through the action of man. One of the wonderful things, I think, about this adventure into space, is that the narrator, the artist, the one thinking up the story, is in a field that is not covered by our own knowledge” you know, Though it’s much of the adventure in the old stories is where they go into regions that no one’s been in before. Well, we’ve now conquered the planet, so there are no empty spaces for the imagination to go forth and fight its own war, you know, with the powers, and that was the first thing I felt, there’s a whole new realm for the imagination to open out and live its forms.

BILL MOYERS: Do you, when you look at something like Star Wars, recognize some of the themes of the hero throughout mythology?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I think that George Lucas was using standard mythological figures. The old man as the adviser, well, specifically what he made me think of is the Japanese swordmaster.

(Clip from Star Wars )

OBI WAN KENOBI:Remember, a Jedi can feel the force flowing through him.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I’ve known some of those people, and this man has a bill of their character.

BILL MOYERS: Well, there’s something mythological, too, isn’t there, in the sense that the hero is helped by this stranger who shows up and gives him some instrument, a sword or a sheaf of light, shaft of light?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes, but he gives him not only a physical instrument, but a psychological commitment and a psychological center,

(Clip from “Star Wars”)

OBI WAN KENOBI: This time, let go your conscious self and act on instinct.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: When he had him exercising with that strange weapon, and then pulled the mask over, that’s real Japanese Stuff.

(Clip from “Star Wars”)

DARTH VADER: I’ll take them myself.

BILL MOYERS: When I took our two sons to see it, they did the same thing the audience did; at that moment when the voice of Ben Kenobi says to Luke Skywalker in the climactic moment

(Clip from “Star Wars”),

OBI WAN KENOBI: Use the force, Luke. Let go. Luke.

BILL MOYERS: The audience broke out into elation and into applause.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: “They did. Well, you see, this thing communicates. It is in a language that is talking to young people today, And that’s marvelous.

BILL MOYERS: So the hero goes for something, he doesn’t just go along for the ride. He’s not a mere adventurer.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, a serendipitous adventure can take place, also, You know, what the word serendipity comes from? Comes from the Sanskrit Swarandwipa, the Isle of Silk, which was formerly the name of Ceylon, And it’s a story about a family that’s just rambling on it’s way to Ceylon, and all these adventures take place. And so you can have the serendipitous adventure as well.

BILL MOYERS: Is the adventurer who takes that kind of trip a hero in the mythological sense?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes, he is ready for it. This is a very interesting thing about these mythological themes. The achievement of the hero is one that he is ready for, and it’s really a manifestation of his character. And it’s amusing, the way in which the landscape and the conditions of the environment match the readiness of the hero. The adventure that he’s ready for is the one that he gets.

(Clip from Star Wars)

HAN SOLO: Look, I ain’t in this for your revolution and I’m not in it for you, Princess. I expect to be well paid. I’m in it for me.

BILL MOYERS: The mercenary, Solo, begins as a mercenary and ends up as a hero.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: He was a very practical guy, a materialist in his character, at least as he thought of himself. But he was a compassionate human being at the same time, and didn’t know it. The adventure evoked a quality of his character that he hadn’t known he possessed.

(Clip from “Star Wars”)

PRINCESS LElA: I love you.

HAN SOLO: I know.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: He thinks he’s an egoist, he really isn’t, and that’s a very lovable kind of human being, I think, and there are lots of them functioning beautifully in the world. They think they’re working for themselves, very practical and all, but no, there’s something else pushing them.

BILL MOYERS: What did you think about the scene in the bar?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s my favorite, not only in this piece, but of many, many pieces I’ve ever seen.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, where you are is on the edge, you’re about to embark into the outlying spaces. And–

BILL MOYERS: The real adventure.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The real adventure. This is the jumping-off place, and there is where you meet people who’ve been out there, and they run the machines that go out there, and you haven’t been there. It reminds me a little bit in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the atmosphere before you start off the adventure. You’re in the seaport, and there’s old salts, seamen who’ve been on the sea, and that’s their world, and these are the space people, also.

(Clip from “Star Wars”)

HAN SOLO: I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

LUKE SKYWALKER: The walls are moving!

PRINCESS LElA: Don’t just stand there, try and brace it with something.

BILL MOYERS: My favorite scene was when they were in the garbage compacter, and the walls were closing in, and I thought, that’s like the belly of the whale that Jonah came out of.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s what it is, yes, that’s where they were, down in the belly of the whale.

BILL MOYERS: What’s the mythological significance of the belly?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It’s the descent into the dark. Jonah in the whale, I mean, that’s a standard motif of going into the whale’s belly and coming out again.

BILL MOYERS: Why must the hero do that?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The whale represents the personification, you might say, of all that is in the unconscious. In reading these things psychologically, water is the unconscious. The creature in the water would be the dynamism of the unconscious, which is dangerous and powerful and has to be controlled by consciousness.

The first stage in the hero adventure, when he starts off on adventure, is leaving the realm of light, which he controls and knows about. and moving toward the threshold. And it’s at the threshold that the monster of the abyss comes to meet him. And then there are two or three results: one, the hero is cut to pieces and descends into the abyss in fragments, to be resurrected; or he may kill the dragon power, as Siegfried does when he kills the dragon. But then he tastes the dragon blood, that is to say, he has to assimilate that power. And when Siegfried has killed the dragon and tasted the blood, he hears the song of nature; he has transcended his humanity, you know, and reassociated himself with the powers of nature, which are the powers of our life, from which our mind removes us.

You see, this thing up here, this consciousness, thinks it’s running the shop. It’s a secondary organ; it’s a secondary organ of a total human being, and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body.

(Clip from “Star Wars”)

DARTH VADER: Join me, and I will complete your training.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: When it does put itself in control, you get this Vader, the man who’s gone over to the intellectual side.

(Clip from “Star Wars”)

LUKE SKYWALKER: I’ll never join you!

DARTH VADER: If you only knew the power of the dark side.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: He isn’t thinking, or living in terms of humanity, he’s living in terms of a system. And this is the threat to our lives; we all face it, we all operate in our society in relation to a system. Now, is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity, or are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes?

BILL MOYERS: Would the hero with a thousand faces help us to answer that question, about how to change the system so that we are not serving it?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I don’t think it would help you to change the system, but it would help you to live in the system as a human being.

BILL MOYERS: By doing what?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, like Luke Skywalker, not going over, but resisting its impersonal claims.

BILL MOYERS: But I can hear someone out there in the audience saying, “Well, that’s all well and good for the imagination of a George Lucas or for the scholarship of a Joseph Campbell, but that isn’t what happens in my life.”

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: You bet it does. If the person doesn’t listen to the demands of his own spiritual and heart life, and insists on a certain program, you’re going to have a schizophrenic crack-up. The person has put himself off-center; he has aligned himself with a programmatic life, and it’s not the one the body’s interested in at all. And the world’s full of people who have stopped listening to themselves. In my own life, I’ve had many opportunities to commit myself to a system and to go with it, and to obey its requirements. My life has been that of a maverick; I would not submit.

BILL MOYERS: You really believe that the creative spirit ranges on its own out there, beyond the boundaries?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes, I do.

BILL MOYERS: Something of the hero in that, I don’t mean to suggest that you see yourself as a hero.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: No, I don’t, but I see myself as a maverick.

BILL MOYERS: So perhaps the hero lurks in each one of us, when we don’t know it

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, yes, I mean, our life evokes our character, and you find out more about yourself as you go on. And it’s very nice to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature, rather than your lower.

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