“Turn back,” said the prince, “that I may somehow find deliverance from these destroyers of life—old age, sickness, and death.”
Just one trip more—and what he sees this time is a mendicant monk; “What sort of man is that?” he asks.
“That is a holy man,” the driver replies, “one who has abandoned the goods of this world and lives without desire or fear.” Whereupon the young prince, on returning to his palace, resolved to leave his father’s house and to seek a way of release from life’s sorrows.
MOYERS: Do most myths say that suffering is an intrinsic part of life, and that there’s no way around it?
CAMPBELL: I can’t think of any that say that if you’re going to live, you won’t suffer. Myths tell us how to confront and bear and interpret suffering, but they do not say that in life there can or should be no suffering.
When the Buddha declares there is escape from sorrow, the escape is Nirvana, which is not a place, like heaven, but a psychological state of mind in which you are released from desire and fear.
MOYERS: And your life becomes—
CAMPBELL: —harmonious, centered, and affirmative.
MOYERS: Even with suffering?
CAMPBELL: Exactly. The Buddhists speak of the bodhisattva—the one who knows immortality, yet voluntarily enters into the field of the fragmentation of time and participates willingly and joyfully in the sorrows of the world. And this means not only experiencing sorrows oneself but participating with compassion in the sorrows of others. Compassion is the awakening of the heart from bestial self-interest to humanity. The word “compassion” means literally “suffering with.”
MOYERS: But you don’t mean compassion condones suffering, do you?
CAMPBELL: Of course compassion condones suffering in that it recognizes, yes, suffering is life.
MOYERS: That life is lived with sufferings—
CAMPBELL: —with the suffering—but you’re not going to get rid of it. Who, when or where, has ever been quit of the suffering of life in this world?
I had an illuminating experience from a woman who had been in severe physical pain for years, from an affliction that had stricken her in her youth. She had been raised a believing Christian and so thought this had been God’s punishment of her for something she had done or not done at that time. She was in spiritual as well as physical pain. I told her that if she wanted release, she should affirm and not deny her suffering was her life, and that through it she had become the noble creature that she now was. And while I was saying all this, I was thinking, “Who am I to talk like this to a person in real pain, when I’ve never had anything more than a toothache?” But in this conversation, in affirming her suffering as the shaper and teacher of her life, she experienced a conversion—right there. I have kept in touch with her since—that was years and years ago—and she is indeed a transformed woman.
MOYERS: There was a moment of illumination?
CAMPBELL: Right there—I saw it happen.
MOYERS: Was it something you said mythologically?
CAMPBELL: Yes, although it’s a little hard to explain. I gave her the belief that she was herself the cause of her suffering, that she had somehow brought it about. There is an important idea in Nietzsche, of Amor fati, the “love of your fate,” which is in fact your life. As he says, if you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unraveled the whole thing. Furthermore, the more challenging or threatening the situation or context to be assimilated and affirmed, the greater the stature of the person who can achieve it. The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.
My friend had thought, “God did this to me.” I told her, “No, you did it to yourself. The God is within you. You yourself are your creator. If you find that place in yourself from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life.”
MOYERS: The only alternative would be not to live.
CAMPBELL: “All life is suffering,” said the Buddha, and Joyce has a line—“Is life worth leaving?”
MOYERS: But what about the young person who says, “I didn’t choose to be born—my mother and father made the choice for me.”
CAMPBELL: Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, and Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself. That’s the helpful thing about the Indian idea of karma. Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.
MOYERS: But what about chance? A drunken driver turns the corner and hits you. That isn’t your fault. You haven’t done that to yourself.
CAMPBELL: From that point of view, is there anything in your life that did not occur as by chance? This is a matter of being able to accept chance. The ultimate backing of life is chance—the chance that your parents met, for example! Chance, or what might seem to be chance, is the means through which life is realized. The problem is not to blame or explain but to handle the life that arises. Another war has been declared somewhere, and you are drafted into an army, and there go five or six years of your life with a whole new set of chance events. The best advice is to take it all as if it had been of your intention—with that, you evoke the participation of your will.
MOYERS: In all of these journeys of mythology, there’s a place everyone wishes to find. The Buddhists talk of Nirvana, and Jesus talks of peace, of the mansion with many rooms. Is that typical of the hero’s journey—that there’s a place to find?
CAMPBELL: The place to find is within yourself. I learned a little about this in athletics. The athlete who is in top form has a quiet place within himself, and it’s around this, somehow, that his action occurs. If he’s all out there in the action field, he will not be performing properly. My wife is a dancer, and she tells me that this is true in dance as well. There’s a center of quietness within, which has to be known and held. If you lose that center, you are in tension and begin to fall apart.
The Buddhist Nirvana is a center of peace of this kind. Buddhism is a psychological religion. It starts with the psychological problem of suffering: all life is sorrowful; there is, however, an escape from sorrow; the escape is Nirvana—which is a state of mind or consciousness, not a place somewhere, like heaven. It is right here, in the midst of the turmoil of life. It is the state you find when you are no longer driven to live by compelling desires, fears, and social commitments, when you have found your center of freedom and can act by choice out of that. Voluntary action out of this center is the action of the bodhisattvas—joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. You are not grabbed, because you have released yourself from the grabbers of fear, lust, and duties. These are the rulers of the world.
There is an instructive Tibetan Buddhist painting in which the so-called Wheel of Becoming is represented. In monasteries, this painting would not appear inside the cloister but on the outer wall. What is shown is the mind’s image of the world when still caught in the grip of the fear of the Lord Death. Six realms of being are represented as spokes of the ever revolving wheel: one is of animal life, another of human life, another of the gods in heaven, and a fourth of the souls being punished in hell. A fifth realm is of the belligerent demons, antigods, or Titans. And the sixth, finally, is of the hungry ghosts, the souls of those in whose love for others there was attachment, clinging, and expectation. The hungry ghosts have enormous, ravenous bellies and pinpoint mouths. However, in the midst of each of these realms there is a Buddha, signifying the possibility of release and illumination.
In the hub of the wheel are three symbolic beasts—a pig, a cock, and a serpent. These are the powers that keep the wheel revolving—ignorance, desire, and malice. And then, finally, the rim of the wheel represents the bounding horizon of anyone’s consciousness who is moved by the triad of powers of the hub and held in the grip of the fear of death. In the center, surrounding the hub and what are known as the “three poisons,” are souls descending in da
rkness and others ascending to illumination.
MOYERS: What is the illumination?
CAMPBELL: The illumination is the recognition of the radiance of one eternity through all things, whether in the vision of time these things are judged as good or as evil. To come to this, you must release yourself completely from desiring the goods of this world and fearing their loss. “Judge not that you be not judged,” we read in the words of Jesus. “If the doors of perception were cleansed,” wrote Blake, “man would see everything as it is, infinite.”
MOYERS: That’s a tough trip.
CAMPBELL: That’s a heavenly trip.
MOYERS: But is this really just for saints and monks?
CAMPBELL: No, I think it’s also for artists. The real artist is the one who has learned to recognize and to render what Joyce has called the “radiance” of all things, as an epiphany or showing forth of their truth.
MOYERS: But doesn’t this leave all the rest of us ordinary mortals back on shore?
CAMPBELL: I don’t think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman, or child.
MOYERS: But is art the only way one can achieve this illumination?
CAMPBELL: Art and religion are the two recommended ways. I don’t think you get it through sheer academic philosophy, which gets all tangled up in concepts. But just living with one’s heart open to others in compassion is a way wide open to all.
MOYERS: So the experience of illumination is available to anyone, not just saints or artists. But if it is potentially in every one of us, deep in that unlocked memory box, how do you unlock it?
CAMPBELL: You unlock it by getting somebody to help you unlock it. Do you have a dear friend or good teacher? It may come from an actual human being, or from an experience like an automobile accident, or from an illuminating book. In my own life, mostly it comes from books, though I have had a long series of magnificent teachers.
MOYERS: When I read your work, I think, “Moyers, what mythology has done for you is to place you on a branch of a very ancient tree. You’re part of a society of the living and dead that came long before you were here and will be here long after you are gone. It nourished you and protected you, and you have to nourish it and protect it in return.”
CAMPBELL: Well, it’s been a wonderful support for life, I can tell you. It’s been tremendous what this kind of resource pouring into my life has done.
MOYERS: But people ask, isn’t a myth a lie?
CAMPBELL: No, mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told. So this is the penultimate truth.
It’s important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new radiance, a new harmony, a new splendor. Thinking in mythological terms helps to put you in accord with the inevitables of this vale of tears. You learn to recognize the positive values in what appear to be the negative moments and aspects of your life. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.
MOYERS: The adventure of the hero?
CAMPBELL: Yes, the adventure of the hero—the adventure of being alive.
VI
THE GIFT OF
THE GODDESS
Myths of the Great Goddess teach compassion for all living beings. There you come to appreciate the real sanctity of the earth itself, because it is the body of the Goddess.
MOYERS: The Lord’s Prayer begins, “Our Father which art in Heaven …” Could it have begun “Our Mother”?
CAMPBELL: This is a symbolic image. All of the references of religious and mythological images are to planes of consciousness, or fields of experience that are potential in human spirit. And these images evoke attitudes and experiences that are appropriate to a meditation on the mystery of the source of your own being.
There have been systems of religion where the mother is the prime parent, the source. The mother is really a more immediate parent than the father because one is born from the mother, and the first experience of any infant is the mother. I have frequently thought that mythology is a sublimation of the mother image. We talk of Mother Earth. And in Egypt you have the Mother Heavens, the Goddess Nut, who is represented as the whole heavenly sphere.
MOYERS: I was seized in Egypt upon first seeing the figure of Nut in the ceiling of one of those temples.
CAMPBELL: Yes, I know the temple.
MOYERS: It’s overwhelming in both its ability to evoke awe and in its sensual character.
CAMPBELL: Yes. The idea of the Goddess is related to the fact that you’re born from your mother, and your father may be unknown to you, or the father may have died. Frequently, in the epics, when the hero is born, his father has died, or his father is in some other place, and then the hero has to go in quest of his father.
In the story of the incarnation of Jesus, the father of Jesus was the father in heaven, at least in terms of the symbology. When Jesus goes to the cross, he is on the way to the father, leaving the mother behind. And the cross, which is symbolic of the earth, is the mother symbol. So on the cross, Jesus leaves his body on the mother, from whom he has acquired his body, and he goes to the father, who is the ultimate transcendent mystery source.
MOYERS: What impact has this father quest had on us down through the centuries?
CAMPBELL: It’s a major theme in myth. There’s a little motif that occurs in many narratives related to a hero’s life, where the boy says, “Mother, who is my father?” She will say, “Well, your father is in such and such a place,” and then he goes on the father quest.
In the Odyssey, Odysseus’ son Telemachus is a tiny babe when Odysseus goes off to the Trojan War. The war lasts for ten years, and then, on his journey home, Odysseus is lost for ten more years in the mysterious world of the mythological Mediterranean. Athena comes to Telemachus, who is now twenty years old, and says, “Go find your father.” He doesn’t know where his father is. He goes to Nestor and asks, “Where do you think my father would be?” And Nestor says, “Well, go ask Proteus.” He’s on the father quest.
MOYERS: In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker says to his companions, “I wish I had known my father.” There’s something powerful in the image of the father quest. But why no mother quest?
CAMPBELL: Well, the mother’s right there. You’re born from your mother, and she’s the one who nurses you and instructs you and brings you up to the age when you must find your father.
Now, the finding of the father has to do with finding your own character and destiny. There’s a notion that the character is inherited from the father, and the body and very often the mind from the mother. But it’s your character that is the mystery, and your character is your destiny. So it is the discovery of your destiny that is symbolized by the father quest.
MOYERS: So when you find your father, you find yourself?
CAMPBELL: We have the word in English, “at-one-ment” with the father. You remember the story of Jesus lost in Jerusalem when he’s a little boy about twelve years old. His parents hunt for him, and when they find him in the temple, in conversation with the doctors of the law, they ask, “Why did you abandon us this way? Why did you give us this fear and anxiety?” And he says, “Didn’t you know I had to be about my father’s business?” He’s twelve years old—that’s the age of the adolescent initiations, finding who you are.
MOYERS: But what happened along the way to this reverence that in primitive societies was directed toward the Goddess figure, the Great Goddess, the mother earth—what h
appened to that?
CAMPBELL: Well, that was associated primarily with agriculture and the agricultural societies. It has to do with earth. The human woman gives birth just as the earth gives birth to the plants. She gives nourishment, as the plants do. So woman magic and earth magic are the same. They are related. And the personification of the energy that gives birth to forms and nourishes forms is properly female. It is in the agricultural world of ancient Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Nile, and in the earlier planting-culture systems that the Goddess is the dominant mythic form.
We have found hundreds of early European Neolithic figurines of the Goddess, but hardly anything there of the male figure at all. The bull and certain other animals, such as the boar and the goat, may appear as symbolic of the male power, but the Goddess was the only visualized divinity at that time.
And when you have a Goddess as the creator, it’s her own body that is the universe. She is identical with the universe. That’s the sense of that Goddess Nut figure that you saw in the Egyptian temple. She is the whole sphere of the life-enclosing heavens.
MOYERS: There is one scene of the Goddess swallowing the sun. Remember?
CAMPBELL: The idea is that she swallows the sun in the west and gives birth to the sun in the east, and it passes through her body at night.
MOYERS: So it would be natural for people trying to explain the wonders of the universe to look to the female figure as the explanation of what they see in their own lives.
CAMPBELL: Not only that, but when you move to a philosophical point of view, as in the Goddess religions of India—where the Goddess symbology is dominant to this day—the female represents maya. The female represents what in Kantian terminology we call the forms of sensibility. She is time and space itself, and the mystery beyond her is beyond all pairs of opposites. So it isn’t male and it isn’t female. It neither is nor is not. But everything is within her, so that the gods are her children. Everything you can think of, everything you can see, is a production of the Goddess.
The Power of Myth Page 22