A third position, closer than Gawain’s to that of the Buddha, yet loyal still to the values of life on this earth, is that of Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra. In a kind of parable, Nietzsche describes what he calls the three transformations of the spirit. The first is that of the camel, of childhood and youth. The camel gets down on his knees and says, “Put a load on me.” This is the season for obedience, receiving instruction and the information your society requires of you in order to live a responsible life.
But when the camel is well loaded, it struggles to its feet and runs out into the desert, where it is transformed into a lion—the heavier the load that had been carried, the stronger the lion will be. Now, the task of the lion is to kill a dragon, and the name of the dragon is “Thou shalt.” On every scale of this scaly beast, a “thou shalt” is imprinted: some from four thousand years ago; others from this morning’s headlines. Whereas the camel, the child, had to submit to the “thou shalts,” the lion, the youth, is to throw them off and come to his own realization.
And so, when the dragon is thoroughly dead, with all its “thou shalts” overcome, the lion is transformed into a child moving out of its own nature, like a wheel impelled from its own hub. No more rules to obey. No more rules derived from the historical needs and tasks of the local society, but the pure impulse to living of a life in flower.
MOYERS: So we return to Eden?
CAMPBELL: To Eden before the Fall.
MOYERS: What are the “thou shalts” of a child that he needs to shed?
CAMPBELL: Every one that inhibits his self-fulfillment. For the camel, the “thou shalt” is a must, a civilizing force. It converts the human animal into a civilized human being. But the period of youth is the period of self-discovery and transformation into a lion. The rules are now to be used at will for life, not submitted to as compelling “thou shalts.”
Something of this kind has to be recognized and dealt with by any serious student of art. If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them. That is the time for the lion-deed. You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted. You don’t behave as the person behaves who has never mastered an art.
MOYERS: You say the time comes. How does a child know when his time has come? In ancient societies, the boy, for example, went through a ritual which told him the time had come. He knew that he was no longer a child and that he had to put off the influences of others and stand on his own. We don’t have such a clear moment or an obvious ritual in our society that says to my son, “You are a man.” Where is the passage today?
CAMPBELL: I don’t have the answer. I figure you must leave it up to the boy to know when he has got his power. A baby bird knows when it can fly. We have a couple of birds’ nests right near where we have breakfast in the morning, and we have seen several little families launched. These little things don’t make a mistake. They stay on the branch until they know how to fly, and then they fly. I think somehow, inside, a person knows this.
I can give you examples from what I know of students in art studios. There comes a moment when they have learned what the artist can teach them. They have assimilated the craft, and they are ready for their own flight. Some of the artists allow their students to do that. They expect the student to fly off. Others want to establish a school, and the student finds he has got to be nasty to the teacher, or to say bad things about him, in order to get his own flight. But that is the teacher’s own fault. He ought to have known it was time for the student to fly. The students I know, the ones who are really valid as students, know when it is time to push off.
MOYERS: There is an old prayer that says, “Lord, teach us when to let go.” All of us have to know that, don’t we?
CAMPBELL: That’s the big problem of the parent. Being a parent is one of the most demanding careers I know. When I think what my father and mother gave up of themselves to launch their family—well, I really appreciate that.
My father was a businessman, and, of course, he would have been very happy to have his son go into business with him and take it on. In fact, I did go into business with Dad for a couple of months, and then I thought, “Geez, I can’t do this.” And he let me go. There is that testing time in your life when you have got to test yourself out to your own flight.
MOYERS: Myths used to help us know when to let go.
CAMPBELL: Myths formulate things for you. They say, for example, that you have to become an adult at a particular age. The age might be a good average age for that to happen—but actually, in the individual life, it differs greatly. Some people are late bloomers and come to particular stages at a relatively late age. You have to have a feeling for where you are. You’ve got only one life to live, and you don’t have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it.
MOYERS: What about happiness? If I’m a young person and I want to be happy, what do myths tell me about happiness?
CAMPBELL: The way to find out about your happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you really are happy—not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self-analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what I call “following your bliss.”
MOYERS: But how does mythology tell you about what makes you happy?
CAMPBELL: It won’t tell you what makes you happy, but it will tell you what happens when you begin to follow your happiness, what the obstacles are that you’re going to run into.
For example, there’s a motif in American Indian stories that I call “the refusal of suitors.” There’s a young girl, beautiful, charming, and the young men invite her to marriage. “No, no, no,” she says, “there’s nobody around good enough for me.” So a serpent comes, or, if it’s a boy who won’t have anything to do with girls, the serpent queen of a great lake might come. As soon as you have refused the suitors, you have elevated yourself out of the local field and put yourself in the field of higher power, higher danger. The question is, are you going to be able to handle it?
Another American Indian motif involves a mother and two little boys. The mother says, “You can play around the houses, but don’t go north.” So they go north. There’s the adventurer.
MOYERS: And the point?
CAMPBELL: With the refusal of suitors, of the passing over a boundary, the adventure begins. You get into a field that’s unprotected, novel. You can’t have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.
Now, there’s an Iroquois story that illustrates the motif of the rejection of suitors. A girl lived with her mother in a wigwam on the edge of a village. She was a very beautiful girl but extremely proud and would not accept any of the boys. The mother was terribly annoyed with her.
One day they’re out collecting wood quite a long way from the village and, while they are out, an ominous darkness comes down over them. Now, this wasn’t the dark of night descending. When you have a darkness of this kind, there’s a magician at work somewhere behind it. So the mother says, “Let’s gather some bark and make a little wigwam for ourselves and collect wood for a fire, and we’ll just spend the night here.”
So they do exactly that and prepare a little supper, and the mother falls asleep. Suddenly the girl looks up, and there is a magnificent young man standing there before her with a wampum sash, glorious black feathers—a very handsome fellow. He says, “I’ve come to marry you, and I’ll await your reply.”
And she says, “I have to consult with my mother.”
She does so, the mother accepts the young man, and he gives the mother the wampum belt to prove he’s serious about the proposal. Then he says to the girl, “Tonight I would like you to come to my camp.” And so she leaves with h
im. Mere human beings weren’t good enough for this young lady, and so now she has something really special.
MOYERS: If she hadn’t said no to the first suitors who came through the routine social convention—
CAMPBELL: —she wouldn’t be having this adventure. Now the adventure is strange and marvelous. She accompanies the man to his village, and they enter his lodge. They spend two nights and days together, and on the third day he says to her, “I’m going off today to hunt.” So he leaves. But after he has closed the flap of the entrance, she hears a strange sound outside. She spends the day in the hut alone and, when evening comes, she hears the strange sound again. The entrance flap is flung open, and in slides a prodigious serpent with tongue darting. He puts his head on her lap and says to her, “Now search my head for lice.” She finds all sorts of horrible things there, and when she has killed them all, he withdraws his head, slides out of the lodge, and in a moment, after the door flap has closed, it opens again, and in comes her same beautiful young man. “Were you afraid of me when I came in that way just now?” he asks.
“No,” she replies, “I wasn’t afraid at all.”
So the next day he goes off to hunt again, and presently she steps out of the lodge to gather firewood. The first thing she sees is an enormous serpent basking on the rocks—and then another, and another. She begins to feel very strange, homesick and discouraged, and returns to the lodge.
That evening, the serpent again comes sliding in, again departs and returns as a man. The third day when he has gone, the young woman decides she’s going to try to get out of this place. She leaves the lodge and is in the woods alone, standing, thinking, when she hears a voice. She turns, and there’s a little old man, who says, “Darling, you are in trouble. The man you’ve married is one of seven brothers. They are all great magicians and, like many people of this kind, their hearts are not in their bodies. Go back into the lodge, and in a bag that is hidden under the bed of the one to whom you are married, you will find a collection of seven hearts.” This is a standard worldwide shamanic motif. The heart is not in the body, so the magician can’t be killed. You have to find and destroy the heart.
She returns to the lodge, finds the bag full of hearts, and is running out with it when a voice calls to her, “Stop, stop.” This is the voice, of course, of the magician. But she continues to run. And the voice calls after, “You may think you can get away from me, but you never will.”
Just at that point, she is beginning to faint, when she hears again the voice of the little old man. “I’ll help you,” it says and, to her surprise, he’s pulling her out of the water. She hadn’t known that she was in water. That is to say, that with her marriage she had moved out of the rational, conscious sphere into the field of compulsions of the unconscious. That’s always what’s represented in such adventures under water. The character has slipped out of the realm of controlled action into that of transpersonal compulsions and events. Now, maybe these can be handled, maybe they can’t.
What happens next in this story is that when the old man has pulled her out of the water, she finds herself in the midst of a company of old men standing along the shore, all looking exactly like her rescuer. They are the Thunderers, powers of the upper air. That is, she is still in the transcendent realm into which she brought herself by her refusal of suitors; only now, having torn herself away from the negative aspect of the powers, she has come into possession of the positive.
There is a lot more to this Iroquois tale, of how this young woman, now in the service of the higher powers, enabled them to destroy the negative powers of the abyss, and how, after that, she was conducted back, through a rainstorm, to the lodge of her mother.
MOYERS: Would you tell this to your students as an illustration of how, if they follow their bliss, if they take chances with their lives, if they do what they want to, the adventure is its own reward?
CAMPBELL: The adventure is its own reward—but it’s necessarily dangerous, having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control. We are following our own way, not our daddy’s or our mother’s way. So we are beyond protection in a field of higher powers than we know. One has to have some sense of what the conflict possibilities will be in this field, and here a few good archetypal stories like this may help us to know what to expect. If we have been impudent and altogether ineligible for the role into which we have cast ourselves, it is going to be a demon marriage and a real mess. However, even here there may be heard a rescuing voice, to convert the adventure into a glory beyond anything ever imagined.
MOYERS: It’s easier to stay home, stay in the womb, not take the journey.
CAMPBELL: Yes, but then life can dry up because you’re not off on your own adventure. On the other hand, I have had an opposite, and to me quite surprising, experience in meeting and coming to know someone whose whole youth was controlled and directed by others, from first to last. My friend is a Tibetan who as a child was recognized as being the reincarnation of an abbot who had been reincarnating since about the seventeenth century. He was taken into a monastery at the age of about four and, from that moment, never was asked what he would like to do, but in all things followed to the letter the rules and instruction of his masters. His entire life was planned for him according to the ritual requirements of Tibetan Buddhist monastery life. Every stage in his spiritual development was celebrated with a ceremony. His personal life was translated into an archetypal journey so that, although on the surface he would seem to be enjoying no personal existence whatsoever, he was actually living on a very deep spiritual level an archetypal life like that of a divinity.
In 1959, this life ended. The Chinese Communist military station in Lhasa bombed the summer palace of the Dalai Lama and a season of massacres began. There were monasteries around Lhasa of as many as six thousand monks—all were destroyed, and their monks and abbots were killed and tortured. Many fled, together with hundreds of other refugees, across the almost impassable Himalayas to India. It is a terrible story—largely untold.
Finally all these shattered people arrived in India, which can hardly take care of its own population, and among the refugees were the Dalai Lama himself and a number of the leading officers and abbots of the great monasteries now destroyed. And they all agreed, Buddhist Tibet is finished. My friend and the other young monks who had managed to escape were advised, therefore, to regard their vows now as of the past, and to feel free to choose, either to continue somehow as monks, or to give up the monastic life and try to find a way to reshape their lives to the requirements and possibilities of the modern secular man.
My friend chose the latter way, not realizing, of course, what this would mean in the way of frustration, poverty, and suffering. He has had a really difficult time, but he has survived it with the will and composure of a saint. Nothing fazes him. I’ve known and worked with him now for over a decade, and in all this time I haven’t heard one word, either of recrimination against the Chinese or of complaint about the treatment he has received here in the West. Nor from the Dalai Lama himself will you ever hear a word of resentment or condemnation. These men and all their friends have been the victims of a terrific upheaval, of terrific violence, and yet they have no hatred. I have learned what religion is from these men. Here is true religion, alive—today.
MOYERS: Love thine enemies.
CAMPBELL: Love thine enemies because they are the instruments of your destiny.
MOYERS: What do myths tell us about a God who lets two sons in one family die in a relatively short period of time, and who continues to visit on that family one ordeal after another? I remember the story of the young Buddha, who saw the decrepit old man and said, “Shame on birth because to everyone who is born, old age will come.” What does mythology say about suffering?
CAMPBELL: Since you bring up the Buddha, let’s talk about that example. The story of the Buddha’s childhood is that he was born as a prince and that, at the time of his birth, a prophet told his father that the infan
t would grow up to be either a world ruler or a world teacher. The good king was interested in his own profession, and the last thing he wanted was that his son should become a teacher of any kind. So he arranged to have the child brought up in an especially beautiful palace where he should experience nothing the least bit ugly or unpleasant that might turn his mind to serious thoughts. Beautiful young women played music and took care of the child. And there were beautiful gardens, lotus ponds, and all.
But then one day the young prince said to his chariot driver, his closest friend, “I’d like to go out and see what life is like in the town.” His father, on hearing this, tried to make everything nice so that his son, the young prince, should see nothing of the pain and misery of life in this world. The gods, however, saw to it that the father’s program for his son should be frustrated.
So, as the royal chariot was rolling along through the town, which had been swept clean, with everything ugly kept out of sight, one of the gods assumed the form of a decrepit old man and was standing there, within view. “What’s that?” the young prince asked his charioteer, and the reply he received was, “That’s an old man. That’s age.”
“Are all men then to grow old?” asked the prince.
“Ah, yes,” the charioteer replied.
“Then shame on life,” said the traumatized young prince, and he begged, sick at heart, to be driven home.
On a second trip, he saw a sick man, thin and weak and tottering, and again, on learning the meaning of this sight, his heart failed him, and the chariot returned to the palace.
On the third trip, the prince saw a corpse followed by mourners. “That,” said the charioteer, “is death.”
The Power of Myth Page 21