MOYERS: The troubadours weren’t aiming, were they, to dissolve marriages or the world, nor was their aim carnal intercourse, lust, or even the quenching of the soul of God. You write, “Rather, they celebrated life directly in the experience of love as a refining, sublimating force, opening the heart to the sad bittersweet melody of being through love, one’s own anguish and one’s own joy.” They weren’t trying to destroy things, were they?
CAMPBELL: No, you see, that motive of power was not what was in them. It was the motive of personal experience and sublimation. It’s quite different. There was no direct attack on the Church. The idea was to sublimate life into a spiritual plane of experiences.
MOYERS: Love is right in front of me. Amor is the path directly before me, the eyes—
CAMPBELL: —the meeting of the eyes, that idea. “So through the eyes love attains the heart: / For the eyes are the scouts of the heart.”
MOYERS: What was it that the troubadours learned about the psyche? We’ve heard about the psyche—Eros loved Psyche—and we’re told in our day that you must understand your psyche. What did the troubadours discover about the human psyche?
CAMPBELL: What they discovered was a certain individual aspect of it that cannot be talked about in purely general terms. The individual experience, the individual commitment to experience, the individual believing in his experience and living it—that is the main point here.
MOYERS: So love is not love in general, it is love for that woman?
CAMPBELL: For that one woman. That’s right.
MOYERS: Why do you think we fall in love with one person and not another?
CAMPBELL: Well, I wouldn’t be one to say. It’s a very mysterious thing, that electric thing that happens, and then the agony that can follow. The troubadours celebrate the agony of the love, the sickness the doctors cannot cure, the wounds that can be healed only by the weapon that delivered the wound.
MOYERS: Meaning?
CAMPBELL: The wound is the wound of my passion and the agony of my love for this creature. The only one who can heal me is the one who delivered the blow. That’s a motif that appears in symbolic form in many medieval stories of the lance that delivers a wound. It is only when that lance can touch the wound again that the wound can be healed.
MOYERS: Wasn’t there something of this idea in the legend of the Holy Grail?
CAMPBELL: In the monastic version of the story, the Grail is associated with Christ’s passion. The Grail is the chalice of the Last Supper and the chalice that received Christ’s blood when he was taken from the cross.
MOYERS: What does the Grail represent then?
CAMPBELL: There’s a very interesting statement about the origin of the Grail. One early writer says that the Grail was brought from heaven by the neutral angels. You see, during the war in heaven between God and Satan, between good and evil, some angelic hosts sided with Satan and some with God. The Grail was brought down through the middle by the neutral angels. It represents that spiritual path that is between pairs of opposites, between fear and desire, between good and evil.
The theme of the Grail romance is that the land, the country, the whole territory of concern has been laid waste. It is called a wasteland. And what is the nature of the wasteland? It is a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you’re told, with no courage for your own life. That is the wasteland. And that is what T. S. Eliot meant in his poem The Waste Land.
In a wasteland the surface does not represent the actuality of what it is supposed to be representing, and people are living inauthentic lives. “I’ve never done a thing I wanted to in all my life. I’ve done as I was told.” You know?
MOYERS: And the Grail becomes?
CAMPBELL: The Grail becomes the—what can we call it?—that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives. The Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness.
The Grail King, for example, was a lovely young man, but he had not earned the position of Grail King. He rode forth from his castle with the war cry “Amor!” Well, that’s proper for youth, but it doesn’t belong to the guardianship of the Grail. And as he’s riding forth, a Muslim, a pagan knight, comes out of the woods. They both level their lances at each other, and they drive at each other. The lance of the Grail King kills the pagan, but the pagan’s lance castrates the Grail King.
What that means is that the Christian separation of matter and spirit, of the dynamism of life and the realm of the spirit, of natural grace and supernatural grace, has really castrated nature. And the European mind, the European life, has been, as it were, emasculated by this separation. The true spirituality, which would have come from the union of matter and spirit, has been killed. And then what did the pagan represent? He was a person from the suburbs of Eden. He was regarded as a nature man, and on the head of his lance was written the word “Grail.” That is to say, nature intends the Grail. Spiritual life is the bouquet, the perfume, the flowering and fulfillment of a human life, not a supernatural virtue imposed upon it.
And so the impulses of nature are what give authenticity to life, not the rules coming from a supernatural authority—that’s the sense of the Grail.
MOYERS: Is this what Thomas Mann meant when he talked about mankind being the noblest work because it joins nature and spirit?
CAMPBELL: Yes.
MOYERS: Nature and spirit are yearning for each other to meet in this experience. And the Grail that these romantic legends were searching for is the union once again of what has been divided, the peace that comes from joining.
CAMPBELL: The Grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that is lived in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse system, that carries itself between the pairs of opposites of good and evil, light and dark. One writer of the Grail legend starts his long epic with a short poem saying, “Every act has both good and evil results.” Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, toward the harmonious relationships that come from compassion with suffering, from understanding the other person. This is what the Grail is about. And this is what comes out in the romance.
In the Grail legend young Perceval has been brought up in the country by a mother who refused the courts and wanted her son to know nothing about the court rules. Perceval’s life is lived in terms of the dynamic of his own impulse system until he becomes more mature. Then he is offered a lovely young girl in marriage by her father, who has trained him to be a knight. And Perceval says, “No, I must earn a wife, not be given a wife.” And that’s the beginning of Europe.
MOYERS: The beginning of Europe?
CAMPBELL: Yes—the individual Europe, the Grail Europe.
Now, when Perceval comes to the Grail castle, he meets the Grail King, who is brought in on a litter, wounded, kept alive simply by the presence of the Grail. Perceval’s compassion moves him to ask, “What ails you, Uncle?” But he doesn’t ask the question because he has been taught by his instructor that a knight doesn’t ask unnecessary questions. So he obeys the rule, and the adventure fails.
And then it takes him five years of ordeals and embarrassments and all kinds of things to get back to that castle and ask the question that heals the king and heals society. The question is an expression, not of the rules of the society, but of compassion, the natural opening of the human heart to another human being. That’s the Grail.
MOYERS: And it is a kind of love that—
CAMPBELL: Well, it is spontaneous compassion, a suffering with.
MOYERS: What was it Jung said—that the soul cannot exist in peace until it finds its other, and the other is always a you? Is that what the romantic—
CAMPBELL: Yes, exactly, romance. That’s romance. That’s what myth is all about.
MOYERS: Not a sentimental kind of romance?
CAMPBELL: No, sentiment is an echo of violence. It’s not really a vital expressio
n.
MOYERS: What do you think all of this says about romantic love? About our individual selves?
MOYERS: It says that we’re in two worlds. We’re in our own world, and we’re in the world that has been given us outside, and the problem is to achieve a harmonious relationship between the two. I come into this society, so I’ve got to live in terms of this society. It’s ridiculous not to live in terms of this society because, unless I do, I’m not living. But I mustn’t allow this society to dictate to me how I should live. One has to build up one’s own system that may violate the expectations of the society, and sometimes society doesn’t accept that. But the task of life is to live within the field provided by the society that is really supporting you.
A point comes up—for instance, a war, where the young men have to register for the draft. This involves an enormous decision. How far are you going to go in acceding to what the society is asking of you—to kill other people whom you don’t know? For what? For whom? All that kind of thing.
MOYERS: That’s what I meant a minute ago when I said society couldn’t exist if every heart were vagrant, every eye were wandering.
CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s certainly so. But there are some societies that shouldn’t exist, you know.
MOYERS: Sooner or later they—
CAMPBELL: —crack up.
MOYERS: The troubadours cracked up that old world.
CAMPBELL: I don’t think it was they, really, who cracked it up.
MOYERS: It was love.
CAMPBELL: It was—well, it was much the same thing. Luther was, in a way, a troubadour of Christ. He had his own idea of what it meant to be a priest. And that smashed up the medieval Church, really. It never recovered.
You know, it’s very interesting to think of the history of Christianity. During the first five centuries, there were lots of Christianities, lots of ways of being Christian. And then, in the period of Theodosius in the fourth century, the only religion allowed in the Roman Empire was the Christian religion, and the only form of Christianity allowed in the Roman Empire was the Christianity of Byzantium’s throne. The vandalism involved in the destruction of the pagan temples of antiquity is hardly matched in world history.
MOYERS: Destroyed by the organized Church?
CAMPBELL: By the organized Church. And why couldn’t Christians live with another religion? What was the matter with them?
MOYERS: What do you think?
CAMPBELL: It’s power, it’s power. I think the power impulse is the fundamental impulse in European history. And it got into our religious traditions.
One of the very interesting things about the Grail legends is that they occur about five hundred years after Christianity has been imposed upon Europe. They represent a coming together of two traditions.
Around the end of the twelfth century, the Abbot Joachim of Floris wrote of the three ages of the spirit. After the Fall in the Garden, he said, God had to compensate for the disaster and reintroduce the spiritual principle into history. He chose a race to become the vehicle of this communication, and that is the age of the Father and of Israel. And then this race, having been prepared as a priestly race, competent to become the vessel of the Incarnation, produces the Son. Thus, the second age is of the Son and the Church, when not a single race but the whole of humanity is to receive the message of the spiritual will of God.
The third age, which this philosopher in around 1260 said was now about to begin, is the age of the Holy Spirit, who speaks directly to the individual. Anyone who incarnates or brings into his life the message of the Word is equivalent to Jesus—that’s the sense of this third age. Just as Israel has been rendered archaic by the institution of the Church, so the Church is rendered archaic by the individual experience.
That began a whole movement of hermits going into the forests to receive the experience. The saint who is regarded as the first representative of this was St. Francis of Assisi, who represented the equivalent of Christ, and who was himself a manifestation in the physical world of the Holy Spirit.
Now, that is what lay behind the quest of the Grail. Galahad on his quest was equivalent to Christ. He was introduced to Arthur’s court in flaming red armor, on the Feast of Pentecost, which is the feast of the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the apostles in the form of fire. Each of us can be a Galahad, you know. That’s a Gnostic position with respect to the message of Christianity. The Gnostic documents, buried in the desert during the time of Theodosius, express this idea.
In the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas, for example, Jesus says, “He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am and I shall be he.” That is the idea in those romances of the Grail.
MOYERS: You’ve said that what happened in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was one of the most important mutations of human feeling and spiritual consciousness, that a new way of experiencing love came into expression.
CAMPBELL: Yes.
MOYERS: And it was in opposition to the ecclesiastical despotism over the heart that required people, particularly young girls, to marry whomever the Church or their parents wanted them to marry. What had this done to the passion of the heart?
CAMPBELL: Well, to say a word for the other first—one has to recognize that in domestic life there grows up a love relationship between the husband and wife even when they’re put together in an arranged marriage. In other words, in arranged marriages of this kind, there is a lot of love. There’s family love, a rich love life on that level. But you don’t get this other thing, of the seizure that comes in recognizing your soul’s counterpart in the other person. And that’s what the troubadours stood for, and that has become the ideal in our lives today.
But marriage is marriage, you know. Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn’t that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it’s off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you’re not married.
MOYERS: Does romance in marriage last?
CAMPBELL: In some marriages, it does. In others, it doesn’t. But the problem, you see, the big word in this troubadour tradition, is “loyalty.”
MOYERS: What do you mean by loyalty?
CAMPBELL: Not cheating, not defecting—through whatever trials or suffering, you remain true.
MOYERS: The Puritans called marriage “the little church within the Church.” In marriage, every day you love, and every day you forgive. It is an ongoing sacrament—love and forgiveness.
CAMPBELL: Well, the real word, I think, is “ordeal,” in its proper sense. That is the submission of the individual to something superior to itself. The real life of a marriage or of a true love affair is in the relationship, which is where you are, too. You understand what I mean?
MOYERS: No, I’m not clear on that.
CAMPBELL: Like the yin/yang symbol, you see. Here I am, and here she is, and here we are. Now when I have to make a sacrifice, I’m not sacrificing to her, I’m sacrificing to the relationship. Resentment against the other one is wrongly placed. Life is in the relationship, that’s where your life now is. That’s what a marriage is—whereas, in a love affair, you have two lives in a more or less successful relationship to each other for a certain length of time, as long as it seems agreeable.
MOYERS: In the sacred marriage, what God has joined together is one and cannot be sundered by man.
CAMPBELL: It was one to begin with, and the marriage restates that unity symbolically.
MOYERS: It was one to begin with?
CAMPBELL: Marriage is the symbolic recognition of our identity—two aspects of the same being.
MOYERS: You know the curious old legend of the blind prophet Tiresias?
CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s a grand story. Tiresias was walking through the forest one day when he saw two co
pulating serpents. And he placed his staff between them and was transformed into a woman, and lived as a woman for a number of years. Then again, Tiresias the woman was walking through the forest when she saw two copulating serpents and placed her staff between them and was turned back into a man.
Well, one fine day on Capitol Hill, the Hill of Zeus—
MOYERS: Mount Olympus?
CAMPBELL: —Mount Olympus, yes—Zeus and his Wife were arguing as to who enjoyed sexual intercourse the more, the male or the female. And of course nobody there could decide because they were only on one side of the net, you might say. Then someone said, “Let’s ask Tiresias.”
So they go to Tiresias, and they ask him the question, and he says, “Why, the woman, nine times more than the man.” Well, for some reason that I don’t really understand, Hera, the wife of Zeus, took this badly and struck him blind. And Zeus, feeling a certain responsibility, gave Tiresias the gift of prophecy within his blindness. There’s a good point there—when your eyes are closed to distracting phenomena, you’re in your intuition, and you may come in touch with the morphology, the basic form of things.
MOYERS: Well, what’s the point—that Tiresias, having been transformed into a man and then a woman by the serpents, had knowledge of both the female and the male experience and knew more than either the god or the goddess knew alone?
CAMPBELL: That’s correct. Furthermore, he represented symbolically the fact of the unity of the two. And when Odysseus was sent to the underworld by Circe, his true initiation came when he met Tiresias and realized the unity of male and female.
MOYERS: I’ve often thought that if you could get in touch with your feminine side, or, if you’re a woman, your masculine side, you would know what the gods know and maybe beyond what the gods know.
The Power of Myth Page 26