The Power of Myth

by Joseph Campbell

  Love, which is the fruit of their very seed.

  —GUIRAUT DE BORNEILH (ca. 1138–1200?)

  MOYERS: Love is such a vast subject that—well, if I came to you and said, “Let’s talk about love,” where would you begin?

  CAMPBELL: I’d begin with the troubadours in the twelfth century.

  MOYERS: And who were they?

  CAMPBELL: The troubadours were the nobility of Provence and then later other parts of France and Europe. In Germany they’re known as the Minnesingers, the singers of love. Minne is the medieval German word for love.

  MOYERS: Were they the poets of their age?

  CAMPBELL: They were poets of a certain character, yes. The period for the troubadours is the twelfth century. The whole troubadour tradition was extinguished in Provence in the so-called Albigensian Crusade of 1209, which was launched by Pope Innocent III, and which is regarded as one of the most monstrous crusades in the history of Europe.

  The troubadours became associated with the Manichean heresy of the Albigensians that was rampant at that time—though the Albigensian movement was really a protest against the corruption of the medieval clergy. So the troubadours and their transformation of the idea of love got mixed up in religious life in a very complicated way.

  MOYERS: The transformation of love? What do you mean?

  CAMPBELL: The troubadours were very much interested in the psychology of love. And they’re the first ones in the West who really thought of love the way we do now—as a person-to-person relationship.

  MOYERS: What had it been before that?

  CAMPBELL: Before that, love was simply Eros, the god who excites you to sexual desire. This is not the experience of falling in love the way the troubadours understood it. Eros is much more impersonal than falling in love. You see, people didn’t know about Amor. Amor is something personal that the troubadours recognized. Eros and Agape are impersonal loves.

  MOYERS: Explain.

  CAMPBELL: Eros is a biological urge. It’s the zeal of the organs for each other. The personal factor doesn’t matter.

  MOYERS: And Agape?

  CAMPBELL: Agape is love thy neighbor as thyself—spiritual love. It doesn’t matter who the neighbor is.

  MOYERS: Now, this is not passion in the sense that Eros mandates it, this is compassion, I would think.

  CAMPBELL: Yes, it is compassion. It is a heart opening. But it is not individuated as Amor is.

  MOYERS: Agape is a religious impulse.

  CAMPBELL: Yes. But Amor could become a religious impulse, too. The troubadours recognized Amor as the highest spiritual experience.

  You see, the experience of Eros is a kind of seizure. In India, the god of love is a big, vigorous youth with a bow and a quiver of arrows. The names of the arrows are “Death-bringing Agony” and “Open Up” and so forth. Really, he just drives this thing into you so that it’s a total physiological, psychological explosion.

  Then the other love, Agape, is a love of the neighbor as thyself. Again, it doesn’t matter who the person is. It is your neighbor, and you must have that kind of love.

  But with Amor we have a purely personal ideal. The kind of seizure that comes from the meeting of the eyes, as they say in the troubadour tradition, is a person-to-person experience.

  MOYERS: There’s a poem in one of your books about this meeting of the eyes: “So through the eyes love attains the heart.…”

  CAMPBELL: That’s completely contrary to everything the Church stood for. It’s a personal, individual experience, and I think it’s the essential thing that’s great about the West and that makes it different from all other traditions I know.

  MOYERS: So the courage to love became the courage to affirm one’s own experience against tradition—the tradition of the Church. Why was that important in the evolution of the West?

  CAMPBELL: It was important in that it gave the West this accent on the individual, that one should have faith in his experience and not simply mouth terms handed down to him by others. It stresses the validity of the individual’s experience of what humanity is, what life is, what values are, against the monolithic system. The monolithic system is a machine system: every machine works like every other machine that’s come out of the same shop.

  MOYERS: What did you mean when you wrote that the beginning of romantic love in the West was “libido over credo”?

  CAMPBELL: Well, the credo says “I believe,” and I believe not only in the laws, but I believe that these laws were instituted by God, and there’s no arguing with God. These laws are a heavy weight on me, and disobeying these is sin and has to do with my eternal character.

  MOYERS: That’s the credo?

  CAMPBELL: That’s the credo. You believe, and then you go to confession, and you run down through the list of sins, and you count yourself against those, and instead of going into the priest and saying, “Bless me, father, for I have been great this week,” you meditate on the sins, and in meditating on the sins, then you really become a sinner in your life. It’s a condemnation, actually, of the will to life, that’s what the credo is.

  MOYERS: And libido?

  CAMPBELL: The libido is the impulse to life. It comes from the heart.

  MOYERS: And the heart is—

  CAMPBELL: —the heart is the organ of opening up to somebody else. That’s the human quality as opposed to the animal qualities, which have to do with self-interest.

  MOYERS: So you’re talking about romantic love as opposed to lust, or passion, or a general religious sentiment?

  CAMPBELL: Yes. You know, the usual marriage in traditional cultures was arranged for by the families. It wasn’t a person-to-person decision at all. In India to this day, you have columns in the newspapers of advertisements for wives that are put in by marriage brokers. I remember, in one family that I knew there, the daughter was going to marry. She had never seen the young man she was going to marry, and she would ask her brothers, “Is he tall? Is he dark? Is he light? What?”

  In the Middle Ages, that was the kind of marriage that was sanctified by the Church. And so the troubadour idea of real person-to-person Amor was very dangerous.

  MOYERS: Because it was heresy?

  CAMPBELL: Not only heresy, it was adultery, what might be called spiritual adultery. Since the marriages were all arranged by society, the love that came from the meeting of the eyes was of a higher spiritual value.

  For example, in the Tristan romance, Isolde is engaged to marry King Mark. They have never seen each other. Tristan is sent to fetch Isolde to Mark. Isolde’s mother prepares a love potion, so that the two who are to be married will have real love for each other. And this love potion is put in the charge of the nurse, who is to go with Isolde. The love potion is left unguarded, and Tristan and Isolde think it’s wine, and they drink it. They’re overtaken with love. But they had already been in love, they just didn’t know it. The love potion just touched it off. One remembers that kind of experience from one’s own youth.

  The problem from the troubadour point of view is that King Mark and Isolde, who are to be married, are not really qualified for love. They have never even seen each other. The true marriage is the marriage that springs from the recognition of identity in the other, and the physical union is simply the sacrament in which that is confirmed. It doesn’t start the other way around, with the physical interest that then becomes spiritualized. It starts from the spiritual impact of love—Amor.

  MOYERS: Christ spoke of “the adulterer at heart,” the violation of the union that takes place spiritually, in the mind and heart.

  CAMPBELL: And every marriage was such a violation when it was arranged by the society and not by the heart. That’s the sense of courtly love in the Middle Ages. It is in direct contradiction to the way of the Church. The word AMOR spelt backwards is ROMA, the Roman Catholic Church, which was justifying marriages that were simply political and social in their character. And so came this movement validating individual choice, what I call following your bliss.

>   But there’s danger, too, of course. In the Tristan romance, when the young couple has drunk their love potion and Isolde’s nurse realizes what has happened, she goes to Tristan and says, “You have drunk your death.” And Tristan says, “By my death, do you mean this pain of love?”—because that was one of the main points, that one should feel the sickness of love. There’s no possible fulfillment in this world of that identity one is experiencing. Tristan says, “If by my death, you mean this agony of love, that is my life. If by my death, you mean the punishment that we are to suffer if discovered, I accept that. And if by my death, you mean eternal punishment in the fires of hell, I accept that, too.” Now, that’s big stuff.

  MOYERS: Especially for medieval Catholics, who believed in a literal hell. So what’s the significance of what Tristan was saying?

  CAMPBELL: What he was saying is that his love is bigger even than death and pain, than anything. This is the affirmation of the pain of life in a big way.

  MOYERS: And he would choose this pain of love now even though it might mean everlasting pain and damnation in hell.

  CAMPBELL: Any life career that you choose in following your bliss should be chosen with that sense—that nobody can frighten me off from this thing. And no matter what happens, this is the validation of my life and action.

  MOYERS: And in choosing love, too?

  CAMPBELL: In choosing love, too.

  MOYERS: You wrote once that the point about hell, as about heaven, is that, when you’re there, you’re in your proper place, which is finally where you want to be.

  CAMPBELL: That was Bernard Shaw’s idea, and really Dante’s idea, also. The punishment in hell is that you have for eternity that which you thought you wanted on earth.

  MOYERS: Tristan wanted his love, he wanted his bliss, and he was willing to suffer for it.

  CAMPBELL: Yes. But then William Blake says in his wonderful series of aphorisms The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “As I was walking among the fires of hell … which to angels look like torment”—that is to say, for the people who are there, who are not angels, it’s not the fire of pain, it’s the fire of delight.

  MOYERS: I remember in Dante’s Inferno, as Dante is looking on the great lovers of history in hell, he sees Helen, and he sees Cleopatra, and he sees Tristan. What’s the significance of that?

  CAMPBELL: Dante is taking the Church’s attitude that this is hell, and that they’re suffering there. Remember, he sees the two young lovers from the Italy of his day, Paolo and Francesca. Francesca had a love affair with Paolo, the brother of her husband. And Dante, like a social scientist, says, “Darling, how did this happen? What brought this about?” And then come the most famous lines in Dante. Francesca says that Paolo and she were sitting under a tree in the garden reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. “And when we read of their first kiss, we looked at each other and read no more in the book that day.” And that was the beginning of their fall.

  That this wonderful experience should be condemned as a sin is the thing the troubadour just says no to. Love is the meaning of life—it is the high point of life.

  MOYERS: Is that what Wagner meant in his great opera on Tristan and Isolde, when he said, “In this world let me have my world, to be damned with it or to be saved”?

  CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s exactly what Tristan said.

  MOYERS: Meaning, I want my love, I want my life.

  CAMPBELL: This is my life, yes. And I’m willing to take any kind of pain for it.

  MOYERS: And this took a courage, didn’t it?

  CAMPBELL: Doesn’t it? Even to think of it.

  MOYERS: “Doesn’t it”—you put it in the present tense.

  CAMPBELL: Yes.

  MOYERS: Even now?

  CAMPBELL: Yes.

  MOYERS: You have said that the point of all these pioneers in love is that they decided to be the author and means of their own self-fulfillment, that the realization of love is to be nature’s noblest work, and that they were going to take their wisdom from their own experience and not from dogma, politics, or any current concepts of social good. And is this the beginning of the romantic idea of the Western individual taking matters into his or her own hands?

  CAMPBELL: Absolutely. You can see examples in Oriental stories of this kind of thing, but it did not become a social system. It has now become the ideal of love in the Western world.

  MOYERS: Love from one’s own experience, taking one’s own experience as the source of wisdom?

  CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s the individual. The best part of the Western tradition has included a recognition of and respect for the individual as a living entity. The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society.

  MOYERS: But what happens to institutions—to universities, to corporations, to churches, to the political institutions of our society—if we all just run off and follow our love? Isn’t there a tension in this? Individual versus society? There has to be some legitimate point beyond which individual intuition, the individual libido, the individual desire, the individual love, the individual impulse to do what you want to do must be restrained—otherwise, you’d have tumult and anarchy, and no institution could survive. Are you really saying that we should follow our bliss, follow our love, wherever it leads?

  CAMPBELL: Well, you’ve got to use your head. They say, you know, a narrow path is a very dangerous path—the razor’s edge.

  MOYERS: So the head and the heart should not be at war?

  CAMPBELL: No, they should not. They should be in cooperation. The head should be present, and the heart should listen to it now and then.

  MOYERS: Are there times when the heart is in the lead?

  CAMPBELL: That would be the desirable situation most of the time. The five main virtues of the medieval knight might be brought in here. One is temperance, another is courage, another is love, another is loyalty, and another is courtesy. Courtesy is respect for the decorum of the society in which you are living.

  MOYERS: So love doesn’t go riding alone, love is attended by—

  CAMPBELL: It is one of a number of functions. One way to go crazy is to have one function dominate the whole system and not serve the order. And the medieval idea, in spite of the fact that these people were in protest against the ecclesiastical authorities, was respect for the society in which they were participating. Everything was done according to rules. When two knights fought, they did not violate the rules of combat although they were engaged in mortal combat. This courtesy has to be held in mind.

  MOYERS: Were there rules of law? Rules of love? Were there restraints on adultery, for example? If your eyes met someone who was not your wife or husband, what was to be your response in the medieval era?

  CAMPBELL: Well, that was the beginning of the courtly love relationship. There were game rules there, and they played it according to the rules. They had their own system of rules. They were not those of the Church, but they were rules for playing the game harmoniously and with the results that were intended. Anything you do involves a system of rules that state how a thing is to be done and done well. It has been said that art is the making of things well. And the conduct of a love affair—well, you could be a clumsy lout in this, but how much nicer to have the knowledge of certain rules that enable the expression to become more eloquent and gratifying.

  MOYERS: So the age of chivalry was growing up as the age of romantic love was reaching out.

  CAMPBELL: I’d say these were the same thing. It was a very strange period because it was terribly brutal. There was no central law. Everyone was on his own, and, of course, there were great violations of everything. But within this brutality, there was a civilizing force, which the women really represented because they were the ones who established the rules for this game. And the men had to play it according to the requirements of the women.

  MOYERS: How did it happen that the women had the dominant influence?

  CAMPBELL: Because, if you wa
nt to make love to a woman, she’s already got the drop on you. The technical term for the woman’s granting of herself was “merci.” The woman grants her “merci.” Now, that might consist in her permission to kiss her on the back of the neck once every Whitsuntide, you know, something like that—or it might be a full giving in love. That would depend upon her estimation of the character of the candidate.

  MOYERS: So there were rules to determine the testing?

  CAMPBELL: Yes. There was an essential requirement—that one must have a gentle heart, that is, a heart capable of love, not simply of lust. The woman would be testing to find whether the candidate for her love had a gentle heart, whether he was capable of love.

  We have to remember also that these ladies were all of the nobility, and the nobility in that time were pretty sophisticated and competent people, both in their brutality and in their tenderness. Today I don’t know what one would do to test the temperament to see if he had a gentle heart, or whether that would be an ideal that anyone would even want—a gentle heart.

  MOYERS: What does the idea of the gentle heart suggest to you?

  CAMPBELL: One that is capable of—well, the key word for me is compassion.

  MOYERS: Which means?

  CAMPBELL: Suffering with. “Passion” is “suffering,” and “com-” is “with.” The German word really gives it in a clearer way: mitleid, “with” (mit) “sorrow or suffering” (leid). The essential idea was to test this man to make sure that he would suffer things for love, and that this was not just lust.

  MOYERS: Joe, that may have emerged in the troubadour period, but it was still alive and well in the early 1950s in East Texas.

  CAMPBELL: That’s the force of this position. It originated in twelfth-century Provence, and you’ve got it now in twentieth-century Texas.

  MOYERS: It’s been shattered of late, I have to tell you that. I mean, I’m not sure that it’s as much of a test as it used to be. I was grateful for the test—I think. I’m not sure.…

  CAMPBELL: The tests that were given then involved, for example, sending a chap out to guard a bridge. The traffic in the Middle Ages was somewhat encumbered by these youths guarding bridges. But also the tests included going into battle. A woman who was too ruthless in asking her lover to risk real death before she would acquiesce in anything was considered sauvage or “savage.” Also, the woman who gave herself without the testing was “savage.” There was a very nice psychological estimation game going on here.