III

THE FIRST
STORYTELLERS

MOYERS: Do you think the poet Wordsworth was right when he wrote, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:/The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,/Hath had elsewhere its setting,/And cometh from afar”? Do you think that is so?

CAMPBELL: I do. Not in entire forgetfulness—that is to say, the nerves in our body carry the memories that shaped the organization of our nervous system to certain environmental circumstances and to the demands of an organism.

MOYERS: What do our souls owe to ancient myths?

CAMPBELL: The ancient myths were designed to harmonize the mind and the body. The mind can ramble off in strange ways and want things that the body does not want. The myths and rites were means of putting the mind in accord with the body and the way of life in accord with the way that nature dictates.

MOYERS: So these old stories live in us?

CAMPBELL: They do indeed. The stages of human development are the same today as they were in the ancient times. As a child, you are brought up in a world of discipline, of obedience, and you are dependent on others. All this has to be transcended when you come to maturity, so that you can live not in dependency but with self-responsible authority. If you can’t cross that threshold, you have the basis for neuroses. Then comes the one after you have gained your world, of yielding it—the crisis of dismissal, disengagement.

MOYERS: And ultimately death?

CAMPBELL: And ultimately death. That’s the ultimate disengagement. So myth has to serve both aims, that of inducting the young person into the life of his world—that’s the function of the folk idea—then disengaging him. The folk idea unshells the elementary idea, which guides you to your own inward life.

MOYERS: And these myths tell me how others have made the passage, and how I can make the passage?

CAMPBELL: Yes, and also what are the beauties of the way. I feel this now, moving into my own last years, you know—the myths help me to go with it.

MOYERS: What kind of myths? Give me one that has actually helped you.

CAMPBELL: The tradition in India, for instance, of actually changing your whole way of dress, even changing your name, as you pass from one stage to another. When I retired from teaching, I knew that I had to create a new way of life, and I changed my manner of thinking about my life, just in terms of that notion—moving out of the sphere of achievement into the sphere of enjoyment and appreciation and relaxing to the wonder of it all.

MOYERS: And then there is that final passage through the dark gate?

CAMPBELL: Well, that is no problem at all. The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths. What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?

One of the psychological problems in growing old is the fear of death. People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another—but it’s predictable. And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness rejoins consciousness. It is no longer in this particular environment.

MOYERS: So these myths have something to say about growing old. I asked that because so many of the myths are of these beautiful youth.

CAMPBELL: The Greek myths are. When we think about mythology, we usually think either of the Greek mythology or of the biblical mythology. There is a kind of humanization of the myth material in both of these cultures. There is a very strong accent on the human, and in the Greek myths, especially, on the humanity and glory of the beautiful youth.

But they appreciate age as well. You have the wise old man and the sage as respected characters in the Greek world.

MOYERS: And the other cultures?

CAMPBELL: They don’t stress the beauty of youth to that extent.

MOYERS: You say that the image of death is the beginning of mythology. What do you mean?

CAMPBELL: The earliest evidence of anything like mythological thinking is associated with graves.

MOYERS: And they suggest that men and women saw life, and then they didn’t see it, so they wondered about it?

CAMPBELL: It must have been something like that. You only have to imagine what your own experience would be. The grave burials with their weapons and sacrifices to ensure a continued life—these certainly suggest that there was a person who was alive and warm before you who is now lying there, cold, and beginning to rot. Something was there that isn’t there. Where is it now?

MOYERS: When do you think humans first discovered death?

CAMPBELL: They first discovered death when they were first humans, because they died. Now, animals have the experience of watching their companions dying. But, as far as we know, they have no further thoughts about it. And there is no evidence that humans thought about death in a significant way until the Neanderthal period, when weapons and animal sacrifices occur with burials.

MOYERS: What did these sacrifices represent?

CAMPBELL: That I wouldn’t know.

MOYERS: Only a guess.

CAMPBELL: I try not to guess. You know, we have a tremendous amount of information about this subject, but there is a place where the information stops. And until you have writing, you don’t know what people were thinking. All you have are significant remains of one kind or another. You can extrapolate backward, but that is dangerous. However, we do know that burials always involve the idea of the continued life beyond the visible one, of a plane of being that is behind the visible plane, and that is somehow supportive of the visible one to which we have to relate. I would say that is the basic theme of all mythology—that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one.

MOYERS: What we don’t know supports what we do know.

CAMPBELL: Yes. And this idea of invisible support is connected with one’s society, too. Society was there before you, it is there after you are gone, and you are a member of it. The myths that link you to your social group, the tribal myths, affirm that you are an organ of the larger organism. Society itself is an organ of a larger organism, which is the landscape, the world in which the tribe moves. The main theme in ritual is the linking of the individual to a larger morphological structure than that of his own physical body.

Man lives by killing, and there is a sense of guilt connected with that. Burials suggest that my friend has died, and he survives. The animals that I have killed must also survive. Early hunters usually had a kind of animal divinity—the technical name would be the animal master, the animal who is the master animal. The animal master sends the flocks to be killed.

You see, the basic hunting myth is of a kind of covenant between the animal world and the human world. The animal gives its life willingly, with the understanding that its life transcends its physical entity and will be returned to the soil or to the mother through some ritual of restoration. And this ritual of restoration is associated with the main hunting animal. To the Indians of the American plains, it was the buffalo. On the Northwest coast the great festivals have to do with the run of salmon coming in. When you go to South Africa, the eland, the magnificent antelope, is the principal animal.

MOYERS: And the principal animal is—

CAMPBELL: —is the one that furnishes the food.

MOYERS: So in the early hunting societies there grew up between human beings and animals a bonding that required one to be consumed by the other.

CAMPBELL: That is the way life is. Man is a hunter, and the hunter is a beast of prey. In the myths, the beast of prey and the animal who is preyed upon play two significant roles. They represent two aspects of life—the aggressive, killing, conquering, creating aspect of life, and the one that is the matter or, you might say, the subject matter.

MOYERS: Life itself. What happens in the relationship between the hunter and the hunted?

CAMPBELL: As we know from the life of the Bushmen and from the relation of the native Americans to the buffalo, it is one of reverence, of respect. For example, the Bushmen of Africa live in a desert world. It’s a very hard life, and the hunt in such an environment is a very difficult hunt. There is very little wood for massive, powerful bows. The Bushmen have tiny little bows, and the extent of the arrow’s flight is hardly more than thirty yards. The arrow has a very weak penetration. It can hardly do more than break the animal’s skin. But the Bushmen apply a prodigiously powerful poison to the point of the arrow so that these beautiful animals, the elands, die in pain over a day and a half. After the animal has been shot and is dying painfully of the poison, the hunters have to fulfill certain taboos of not doing this and not doing that in a kind of “participation mystique,” a mystical participation in the death of the animal, whose meat has become their life, and whose death they have brought about. There’s an identification, a mythological identification. Killing is not simply slaughter, it’s a ritual act, as eating is when you say grace before meals. A ritual act is a recognition of your dependency on the voluntary giving of this food to you by the animal who has given its life. The hunt is a ritual.

MOYERS: And a ritual expresses a spiritual reality.

CAMPBELL: It expresses that this is in accord with the way of nature, not simply with my own personal impulse.

I am told that when the Bushmen tell their animal stories, they actually mimic the mouth formations of the different animals, pronouncing the words as though the animals themselves were pronouncing them. They had an intimate knowledge of these creatures, and friendly neighborly relationships.

And then they killed some of them for food. I know ranch people who have a pet cow in addition to their ranch animals. They won’t eat the meat of that cow because there is a kind of cannibalism in eating the meat of a friend. But the aborigines were eating the meat of their friends all the time. Some kind of psychological compensation has to be achieved, and the myths help in doing that.

MOYERS: How?

CAMPBELL: These early myths help the psyche to participate without a sense of guilt or fright in the necessary act of life.

MOYERS: And these great stories consistently refer to this dynamic in one way or the other—the hunt, the hunter, the hunted, and the animal as friend, as a messenger from God.

CAMPBELL: Right. Normally the animal preyed upon becomes the animal that is the messenger of the divine.

MOYERS: And you wind up as the hunter killing the messenger.

CAMPBELL: Killing the god.

MOYERS: Does that cause guilt?

CAMPBELL: No, guilt is what is wiped out by the myth. Killing the animal is not a personal act. You are performing the work of nature.

MOYERS: Guilt is wiped out by the myth?

CAMPBELL: Yes.

MOYERS: But you must at times feel some reluctance upon closing in for the kill. You don’t really want to kill that animal.

CAMPBELL: The animal is the father. You know what the Freudians say, that the first enemy is the father, if you are a man. If you are a boy, every enemy is potentially, psychologically associated with the father image.

MOYERS: Do you think that the animal became the father image of God?

CAMPBELL: Yes. It is a fact that the religious attitude toward the principal animal is one of reverence and respect, and not only that—submission to the inspiration of that animal. The animal is the one that brings the gifts—tobacco, the mystical pipe, and so on.

MOYERS: Do you think this troubled early man—to kill the animal that is a god, or the messenger of a god?

CAMPBELL: Absolutely—that is why you have the rites.

MOYERS: What kind of rites?

CAMPBELL: Rituals of appeasement and of thanks to the animal. For example, when the bear is killed, there is a ceremony of feeding the bear a piece of its own flesh. And then there will be a little ceremony with the bear’s skin placed over a kind of rack, as though he were present—and he is present, he serves his own meat for dinner. A fire is burning—and the fire is the goddess. Then there is a conversation between the mountain god, which is the bear, and the fire goddess.

MOYERS: What do they say?

CAMPBELL: Who knows? No one hears them, but there is a little socializing going on there.

MOYERS: If the cave bears were not appeased, the animals wouldn’t appear, and the primitive hunters would starve to death. They began to perceive some kind of power on which they were dependent, a power greater than their own.

CAMPBELL: Yes. That is the power of the animal master, the willingness of the animals to participate in this game. You find among hunting people all over the world a very intimate, appreciative relationship to the principal food animal. Now, when we sit down to a meal, we thank God for giving us the food. These people thanked the animal.

MOYERS: So appeasing the animal with this ritual honoring the animal would be like bribing the butcher at the supermarket.

CAMPBELL: No, I don’t think it would be bribing at all. It is thanking a friend for cooperating in a mutual relationship. And if you didn’t thank him, the species would become offended.

There are rituals that have been described for killing animals. Before the hunter goes to kill, he will draw on the hilltop a picture of the animal that he is about to kill. And that hilltop will be in such a place that the first rays of the rising sun will strike it. When the sun rises, the hunter is waiting there with a little team of people to perform the rites. And when the light strikes the animal picture, the hunter’s arrow flies right along that light beam and hits the drawn animal, and the woman who is present to assist him raises her hands and shouts. Then the hunter goes out and kills the animal. And the arrow will be just where it was in the picture. The next morning when the sun rises, the hunter erases the animal. This is something that was done in the name of the natural order, not in the name of his personal intention.

Now, there is another story from a totally different sphere of society, of the samurai, the Japanese warrior, who had the duty to avenge the murder of his overlord. When he cornered the man who had murdered his overlord, and he was about to deal with him with his samurai sword, the man in the corner, in the passion of terror, spat in the warrior’s face. And the warrior sheathed the sword and walked away.

MOYERS: Why?

CAMPBELL: Because he was made angry, and if he had killed that man in anger, then it would have been a personal act. And he had come to do another kind of act, an impersonal act of vengeance.

MOYERS: Do you think this kind of impersonality played some part in the psyche of the hunter on the Great Plains?

CAMPBELL: Yes, definitely. Because isn’t it a moral problem to kill somebody and eat that person? You see, these people didn’t think of animals the way we do, as some subspecies. Animals are our equals at least, and sometimes our superiors.

The animal has powers that the human doesn’t have. The shaman, for instance, will often have an animal familiar, that is to say, the spirit of some animal species that will be his support and his teacher.

MOYERS: But if humans begin to be able to imagine and see beauty and create beauty out of the relationship, then they become superior to the animals, do they not?

CAMPBELL: Well, I don’t think they are thinking as much about superiority as equality. They ask the animals for advice, and the animal becomes the model for how to live. In that case, it is superior. And sometimes the animal becomes the giver of a ritual, as in the legends of the origins of the buffalo. For example, you can see this equality in the basic legend of the Blackfoot tribe, which is the origin legend of their buffalo dance rituals by which they invoke the cooperation of the animals in this play of life.

MOYERS: What was that?

CAMPBELL: Well, this story arises from the problem of how you find food for a large tribal group. One way of acquiring meat for the winter would be to drive a buffalo herd over a rock cliff so that they would all tumble over and could be slaughtered easily at the foot of the cliff. This is known as a buffalo fall.

This story is of a Blackfoot tribe, long, long ago, who couldn’t get the buffalo to go over the cliff. The buffalo would approach the cliff and then turn aside. So it looked as though the tribe wasn’t going to have any meat for that winter.

One day, the daughter of one of the houses got up early in the morning to draw the water for the family and happened to look up to the cliff. There on the cliff were the buffalo. And she said, “Oh, if you would only come over, I would marry one of you.”

To her surprise, they all began coming over. Now, that was surprise number one. Surprise number two was when one of the old buffalo, the shaman of the herd, comes and says, “All right, girlie, off we go.”

“Oh, no,” she says.

“Oh, yes,” he says, “you made your promise. We’ve kept our side of the bargain. Look at all my relatives here—dead. Now off we go.”

Well, the family gets up in the morning and they look around, and where is Minnehaha? The father looks around on the ground—you know how Indians are, he can see by the footprints—and he says, “She’s gone off with a buffalo. And I’m going to get her back.”

So he puts on his walking moccasins, his bow and arrow, and so forth, and goes out over the plains. He has gone quite a distance when he feels he better sit down and rest. So he sits down, and he is thinking about what he should do now, when along comes the magpie, one of those clever birds that has shamanic qualities.

MOYERS: Magical qualities.

CAMPBELL: Yes. And the Indian says to him, “O beautiful bird, did my daughter run away with a buffalo? Have you seen her? Would you hunt around and see if you can find her out on the plains somewhere?”

And the magpie says, “Well, there is a lovely girl with the buffalo right now, over there, just a bit away.”

“Well,” says the man, “will you go tell her that her daddy is here at the buffalo wallow?”

So the magpie flies over and finds the girl who is there among the buffalo. They’re all asleep, and she is knitting or something of the kind. And the magpie comes over, and he says, “Your father is over at the wallow waiting for you.”

“Oh,” she says, “this is terrible. This is very dangerous. These buffalo are going to kill us. You tell him to wait, and I’ll be over. I’ll try to work this out.”

Now, her buffalo husband is behind her, and he wakes up and takes off his horn, and says, “Go to the wallow and get me a drink.”

So she takes the horn and goes over, and there is her father. He grabs her by the arm and says, “Come!”

But she says, “No, no, no! This is real danger. The whole herd will be right after us. I have to work this thing out. Now, let me just go back.”

So she gets the water and goes back. And the buffalo says, “Fe, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Indian”—you know, that sort of thing. And she says, no, nothing of the kind. And he says, “Yes indeed!” And he gives a buffalo bellow, and all the buffalo get up, and they all do a slow buffalo dance with tails raised, and they go over, and they trample that poor man to death, so that he disappears entirely. He is just all broken up to pieces. All gone. The girl is crying, and her buffalo husband says, “So you are crying.”

“Yes,” she says, “he is my daddy.”

“Well,” he says, “but what about us? There are our children, at the bottom of the cliff, our wives, our parents—and you cry about your daddy.” Well, apparently he was a kind of compassionate buffalo, and he said, “Okay, if you can bring your daddy back to life again, I will let you go.”

So she turns to the magpie and says, “Please pick around a little bit and see if you can find a bit of Daddy.” And the magpie does so, and he comes up finally with a vertebra, just one little bone. And the girl says, “That’s enough.” And she puts the bone down on the ground and covers it with her blanket and sings a revivifying song, a magical song with great power. And presently—yes, there is a man under the blanket. She looks. “That’s Daddy all right!” But he is not breathing yet. She sings a few more stanzas of whatever the song was, and he stands up.

The buffalo are amazed. And they say, “Well, why don’t you do this for us? We’ll teach you our buffalo dance, and when you will have killed our families, you do this dance and sing this song, and we will all come back to live again.”

And that is the basic idea—that through the ritual that dimension is reached that transcends temporality and out of which life comes and back into which it goes.

MOYERS: What happened a hundred years ago when the white man came and slaughtered this animal of reverence?

CAMPBELL: That was a sacramental violation. You can see in many of the early nineteenth-century paintings by George Catlin of the Great Western Plains in his day literally hundreds of thousands of buffalo all over the place. And then, through the next half century, the frontiersmen, equipped with repeating rifles, shot down whole herds, taking only the skins to sell and leaving the bodies there to rot. This was a sacrilege.

MOYERS: It turned the buffalo from a “thou”—

CAMPBELL: —to an “it.”

MOYERS: The Indians addressed the buffalo as “thou,” an object of reverence.

CAMPBELL: The Indians addressed all of life as a “thou”—the trees, the stones, everything. You can address anything as a “thou,” and if you do it, you can feel the change in your own psychology. The ego that sees a “thou” is not the same ego that sees an “it.” And when you go to war with people, the problem of the newspapers is to turn those people into “its.”

MOYERS: This happens in marriage, too, doesn’t it? And happens with children, too.

CAMPBELL: Sometimes the “thou” turns into an “it,” and you don’t know what the relationship is. The Indian relationship to animals is in contrast to our relationship to animals, where we see animals as a lower form of life. In the Bible we are told that we are the masters. For hunting people, as I said, the animal is in many ways superior. A Pawnee Indian said: “In the beginning of all things, wisdom and knowledge were with the animal. For Tirawa, the One Above, did not speak directly to man. He sent certain animals to tell mankind that he showed himself through the beast. And that from them, and from the stars and the sun and the moon, man should learn.”

MOYERS: So it is in this time of hunting man that we begin to sense a stirring of the mythic imagination, the wonder of things.

CAMPBELL: Yes. There is a burst of magnificent art and all the evidence you need of a mythic imagination in full form.

MOYERS: Do you ever look at these primitive art objects and think not of the art but of the man or woman standing there painting or creating? I find that I speculate—who was he or she?

CAMPBELL: This is what hits you when you go into those ancient caves. What was in their minds as they created these images? How did they get up there? And how did they see anything? The only light they had was a little flickering torch.

And with respect to the problem of beauty—is this beauty intended? Or is it something that is the natural expression of a beautiful spirit? Is the beauty of the bird’s song intentional? In what sense is it intentional? Or is it the expression of the bird, the beauty of the bird’s spirit, you might say? I think that way very often about this art. To what degree was the intention of the artist what we would call “aesthetic” or to what degree expressive? And to what degree is the art something that they had simply learned to do that way?

When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider’s nature. It’s instinctive beauty. How much of the beauty of our own lives is about the beauty of being alive? How much of it is conscious and intentional? That is a big question.

MOYERS: Tell me what you remember when you first looked upon those painted caves.

CAMPBELL: You don’t want to leave. Here you come into an enormous chamber, like a great cathedral, with all these painted animals. The darkness is inconceivable. We were there with electric lights, but in a couple of instances the man who was showing us through turned off the lights, and you were never in darker darkness in your life. It was—I don’t know, just a complete knockout. You don’t know where you are, whether you are looking north, south, east, or west. All orientation is gone, and you are in a darkness that never saw the sun. Then they turn the lights on again, and you see these gloriously painted animals. And they are painted with the vitality of ink on silk in a Japanese painting—you know, just like that. A bull that will be twenty feet long, and painted so that its haunches will be represented by a swelling in the rock. They take account of the whole thing.

MOYERS: You call them temple caves.

CAMPBELL: Yes.

MOYERS: Why?

CAMPBELL: A temple is a landscape of the soul. When you walk into a cathedral, you move into a world of spiritual images. It is the mother womb of your spiritual life—mother church. All the forms around are significant of spiritual value.

Now, in a cathedral, the imagery is in anthropomorphic form. God and Jesus and the saints and all are in human form. And in the caves the images are in animal form. But it’s the same thing, believe me. The form is secondary. The message is what is important.

MOYERS: And the message of the caves?

CAMPBELL: The message of the caves is of a relationship of time to eternal powers that is somehow to be experienced in that place.

MOYERS: What were these caves used for?

CAMPBELL: Scholars speculate that they had to do with the initiation of boys into the hunt. Boys had to learn hot only to hunt but how to respect the animals, and what rituals to perform, and how in their own lives no longer to be little boys but to be men. Those hunts, you see, were very, very dangerous. These caves are the original men’s rite sanctuaries where the boys became no longer their mothers’ sons but their fathers’ sons.

MOYERS: What would happen to me as a child if I went through one of these rites?

CAMPBELL: Well, we don’t know what they did in the caves, but we know what the aborigines do in Australia. Now, when a boy gets to be a little bit ungovernable, one fine day the men come in, and they are naked except for stripes of white bird down that they’ve stuck on their bodies using their own blood for glue. They are swinging the bull-roarers, which are the voices of spirits, and the men arrive as spirits.

The boy will try to take refuge with his mother, and she will pretend to try to protect him. But the men just take him away. A mother is no good from then on, you see. You can’t go back to Mother, you’re in another field.

Then the boys are taken out to the men’s sacred ground, and they’re really put through an ordeal—circumcision, subincision, the drinking of men’s blood, and so forth. Just as they had drunk mother’s milk as children, so now they drink men’s blood. They’re being turned into men. While this is going on, they are being shown enactments of mythological episodes from the great myths. They are instructed in the mythology of the tribe. Then, at the end of this, they are brought back to the village, and the girl whom each is to marry has already been selected. The boy has now come back as a man.

He has been removed from his childhood, and his body has been scarified, and circumcision and subincision have been enacted. Now he has a man’s body. There’s no chance of relapsing back to boyhood after a show like that.

MOYERS: You don’t go back to Mother.

CAMPBELL: No, but in our life we don’t have anything like that. You can have a man forty-five years old still trying to be obedient to his father. So he goes to a psychoanalyst, who does the job for him.

MOYERS: Or he goes to the movies.

CAMPBELL: That might be our counterpart to mythological re-enactments—except that we don’t have the same kind of thinking going into the production of a movie that goes into the production of an initiation ritual.

MOYERS: No, but given the absence of initiation rituals, which have largely disappeared from our society, the world of imagination as projected on that screen serves, even if in a faulty way, to tell that story, doesn’t it?

CAMPBELL: Yes, but what is unfortunate for us is that a lot of the people who write these stories do not have the sense of their responsibility. These stories are making and breaking lives. But the movies are made simply to make money. The kind of responsibility that goes into a priesthood with a ritual is not there. That is one of our problems today.

MOYERS: We have none of those rites today, do we?

CAMPBELL: I’m afraid we don’t. So the youngsters invent them themselves, and you have these raiding gangs, and so forth—that is self-rendered initiation.

MOYERS: So myth relates directly to ceremony and tribal ritual, and the absence of myth can mean the end of ritual.

CAMPBELL: A ritual is the enactment of a myth. By participating in a ritual, you are participating in a myth.

MOYERS: What does the absence of these myths mean to young boys today?

CAMPBELL: Well, the confirmation ritual is the counterpart today of these rites. As a Catholic boy, you choose your confirmed name, the name you are going to be confirmed by. But instead of scarifying you and knocking your teeth out and all, the bishop gives you a smile and a slap on the cheek. It has been reduced to that. Nothing has happened to you. The Jewish counterpart is the bar mitzvah. Whether it actually works to effect a psychological transformation will depend on the individual case, I suppose. But in those old days there was no problem. The boy came out with a different body, and he had really gone through something.

MOYERS: What about the female? Most of the figures in the temple caves are male. Was this a kind of secret society for males?

CAMPBELL: It wasn’t a secret society, it was that the boys had to go through it. Now of course we don’t know exactly what happened to the female in this period because there is very little evidence to tell us. But in primary cultures today the girl becomes a woman with her first menstruation. It happens to her. Nature does it to her. And so she has undergone the transformation, and what is her initiation? Typically it is to sit in a little hut for a certain number of days and realize what she is.

MOYERS: How does she do that?

CAMPBELL: She sits there. She is now a woman. And what is a woman? A woman is a vehicle of life. Life has overtaken her. Woman is what it is all about—the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment. She is identical with the earth goddess in her powers, and she has got to realize that about herself. The boy does not have a happening of this kind, so he has to be turned into a man and voluntarily become a servant of something greater than himself.

MOYERS: This is where the mythic imagination, as far as we know, began to operate.

CAMPBELL: Yes.

MOYERS: What were the chief themes of that era? Death?

CAMPBELL: The mystery of death is one of them—which balances the theme of the mystery of life. It is the same mystery in its two aspects. The next theme is the relationship of this to the animal world, which dies and lives again.

Then there is the motif of procuring food. The relationship of the woman to the nature of the outer world is there. Then we have to take into account the problem of the transformation of children into adults. That transformation is a fundamental concern throughout the ritual life of people. We have it today. There is the problem of turning ungovernable children, who express just the naive impulses of nature, into members of the society. That takes a lot of doing. These people could not tolerate anybody who wouldn’t follow the rules. The society couldn’t support them. They would kill them.

MOYERS: Because they were a threat to the health of the whole?

CAMPBELL: Well, of course. They were like cancers, something that was tearing the body apart. These tribal groups were living on the edge all the time.

MOYERS: And yet out on the edge they began to ask fundamental questions.

CAMPBELL: Yes. But the attitude toward dying wasn’t like ours at all. The notion of a transcendent world was really taken seriously.

MOYERS: One important part of ancient ritual was that it made you a member of the tribe, a member of the community, a member of society. The history of Western culture has been the steadily widening separation of the self from society. “I” first, the individual first.

CAMPBELL: I wouldn’t say that that’s characteristic of Western culture all the way because the separation is not a separation just of a raw biological entity. There has always been the spiritual import until very lately. Now, when you see old newsreels of the installation of the President of the United States, you see him wearing a top hat. President Wilson, even in his time, was wearing a top hat. He did not wear a top hat in his usual life. But, as President, he has a ritual aspect to his presence. Now it’s Johnny-come-lately walking in right off the golf course, you know, and sitting down with you and talking about whether we’re going to have atom bombs. It’s another style. There’s been a reduction of ritual. Even in the Roman Catholic Church, my God—they’ve translated the Mass out of ritual language and into a language that has a lot of domestic associations. The Latin of the Mass was a language that threw you out of the field of domesticity. The altar was turned so that the priest’s back was to you, and with him you addressed yourself outward. Now they’ve turned the altar around—it looks like Julia Child giving a demonstration—all homey and cozy.

MOYERS: And they play a guitar.

CAMPBELL: They play a guitar. They’ve forgotten that the function of ritual is to pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time.

MOYERS: And the ritual of a marriage ceremony pitches you out to the other.

CAMPBELL: It certainly does. But the rituals that once conveyed an inner reality are now merely form. That’s true in the rituals of society as well as the personal rituals of marriage.

MOYERS: So I can see why in some respects religious instruction has become obsolete to a lot of people.

CAMPBELL: With respect to ritual, it must be kept alive. So much of our ritual is dead. It’s extremely interesting to read of the primitive, elementary cultures—how they transform the folk tales, the myths, all the time in terms of the circumstances. People move from an area where, let’s say, the vegetation is the main support, out into the plains. Most of our Plains Indians in the period of the horse-riding Indians had originally been of the Mississippifan culture. They lived along the Mississippi in settled dwelling towns and agriculturally based villages.

And then they receive the horse from the Spaniards, which makes it possible to venture out into the plains and handle the great hunt of the buffalo herds. At this time, the mythology transforms from a vegetation mythology to a buffalo mythology. You can see the structure of the earlier vegetation mythologies underlying the mythologies of the Dakota Indians and the Pawnee Indians and the Kiowa, and so forth.

MOYERS: You’re saying that the environment shapes the story?

CAMPBELL: The people respond to the environment, you see. But now we have a tradition that doesn’t respond to the environment—it comes from somewhere else, from the first millennium B.C. It has not assimilated the qualities of our modern culture and the new things that are possible and the new vision of the universe.

Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world.

MOYERS: You mean artists are the mythmakers of our day?

CAMPBELL: The mythmakers of earlier days were the counterparts of our artists.

MOYERS: They do the paintings on the walls, they perform the rituals.

CAMPBELL: Yes. There’s an old romantic idea in German, das Volk dichtet, which says that the ideas and poetry of the traditional cultures come out of the folk. They do not. They come out of an elite experience, the experience of people particularly gifted, whose ears are open to the song of the universe. These people speak to the folk, and there is an answer from the folk, which is then received as an interaction. But the first impulse in the shaping of a folk tradition comes from above, not from below.

MOYERS: In these early elementary cultures, as you call them, who would have been the equivalent of the poets today?

CAMPBELL: The shamans. The shaman is the person, male or female, who in his late childhood or early youth has an overwhelming psychological experience that turns him totally inward. It’s a kind of schizophrenic crack-up. The whole unconscious opens up, and the shaman falls into it. This shaman experience has been described many, many times. It occurs all the way from Siberia right through the Americas down to Tierra del Fuego.

MOYERS: And ecstasy is a part of it.

CAMPBELL: It iS.

MOYERS: The trance dance, for example, in the Bushman society.

CAMPBELL: Now, there’s a fantastic example of something. The Bushmen live in a desert world. It’s a very hard life, a life of great, great tension. The male and female sexes are, in a disciplined way, separate. Only in the dance do the two come together. And they come together this way. The women sit in a circle or in a little group and beat their thighs, setting a pace for the men dancing around them. The women are the center around which the men dance. And they control the dance and what goes on with the men through their own singing and beating of the thighs.

MOYERS: What’s the significance, that the woman is controlling the dance?

CAMPBELL: Well, the woman is life, and the man is the servant of life. That’s the basic idea in these things. During the course of the circling, which they do all night long, one of the men will suddenly pass out. He experiences what we might call a possession. But it is described as a flash, a kind of thunderbolt or lightning bolt, which passes from the pelvic area right up the spine into the head.

MOYERS: It is described in your book The Way of the Animal Powers—here:

CAMPBELL: “When people sing, I dance. I enter the earth. I go in at a place like a place where people drink water. I travel a long way, very far.” He’s entranced now, and this is a description of an experience. “When I emerge, I am already climbing. I’m climbing threads, the threads that lie over there in the south. I climb one and leave it, then I climb another one. Then I leave it and climb another.… And when you arrive at God’s place, you make yourself small. You have become small. You come in small to God’s place. You do what you have to do there. Then you return to where everyone is, and you hide your face. You hide your face so you won’t see anything. You come and come and come and finally you enter your body again. All the people who have stayed behind are waiting for you—they fear you. You enter, enter the earth, and you return to enter the skin of your body.… And you say ‘he-e-e-e!’ That is the sound of your return to your body. Then you begin to sing. The ntum-masters are there around.” Ntum is the supernatural power. “They take powder and blow it—Phew! Phew!—in your face. They take hold of your head and blow about the sides of your face. This is how you manage to be alive again. Friends, if they don’t do that to you, you die.… You just die and are dead. Friends, this is what it does, this ntum that I do, this ntum here that I dance.”

My God! This guy’s had an experience of another whole realm of consciousness!. In these experiences they are, as it were, flying through the air.

MOYERS: He then becomes the shaman.

CAMPBELL: Not in this culture. He becomes the trance dancer. All the men are potentially tranced.

MOYERS: Is there something like this common in the experience of our culture? I’m thinking particularly of the born-again experience in our Southern culture.

CAMPBELL: There must be. This is an actual experience of transit through the earth to the realm of mythological imagery, to God, to the seat of power. I don’t know what the born-again Christian experience is. I suppose medieval visionaries who saw visions of God and brought back stories of that would have had a comparable experience.

MOYERS: There’s a sense of ecstasy, isn’t there, in this experience?

CAMPBELL: As reported, it’s always of ecstasy.

MOYERS: Have you ever seen such a rite? Such a happening? Have you ever known that kind of ecstasy or witnessed it?

CAMPBELL: No, I have not. I have friends who have been in Haiti a good deal and actually participated in voodoo ceremonials there where people become possessed. And there are dances where the ecstasy is simulated. There was an old idea of going berserk in war, of exciting warriors before they go to battle. They should actually be in a madness while they’re in battle—the battle frenzy.

MOYERS: Is this the only way one can experience the unconscious?

CAMPBELL: No, the other way occurs as a breakthrough for people who have not been thinking that way—and then it comes to them, bang, like that.

MOYERS: And the one who had this psychological experience, this traumatic experience, this ecstasy, would become the interpreter for others of things not seen.

CAMPBELL: He would become the interpreter of the heritage of mythological life, you might say, yes.

MOYERS: And what draws him into that?

CAMPBELL: The best example I know which might help to answer that is the experience of Black Elk.

Black Elk was a young Sioux boy around nine years old. Now, this happened before the American cavalry had encountered the Sioux, who were the great people of the plains. The boy became sick, psychologically sick. His family tells the typical shaman story. The child begins to tremble and is immobilized. The family is terribly concerned about it, and they send for a shaman who has had the experience in his own youth, to come as a kind of psychoanalyst and pull the youngster out of it. But instead of relieving the boy of the deities, the shaman is adapting him to the deities and the deities to himself. It’s a different problem from that of psychoanalysis. I think it was Nietzsche who said, “Be careful lest in casting out the devils you cast out the best thing that’s in you.” Here, the deities who have been encountered—powers, let’s call them—are retained. The connection is maintained, not broken. And these men then become the spiritual advisers and gift-givers to their people.

Well, what happened with this young boy was that he had a prophetic vision of the terrible future of his tribe. It was a vision of what he called “the hoop” of the nation. In the vision, Black Elk saw that the hoop of his nation was one of many hoops, which is something that we haven’t learned at all well yet. He saw the cooperation of all the hoops, all the nations in grand procession. But more than that, the vision was an experience of himself as going through the realms of spiritual imagery that were of his culture and assimilating their import. It comes to one great statement, which for me is a key statement to the understanding of myth and symbols. He says, “I saw myself on the central mountain of the world, the highest place, and I had a vision because I was seeing in the sacred manner of the world.” And the sacred central mountain was Harney Peak in South Dakota. And then he says, “But the central mountain is everywhere.”

That is a real mythological realization. It distinguishes between the local cult image, Harney Peak, and its connotation as the center of the world. The center of the world is the axis mundi, the central point, the pole around which all revolves. The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, but stillness is eternity. Realizing how this moment of your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the temporal experience—this is the mythological experience.

So is the central mountain of the world Jerusalem? Rome? Benares? Lhasa? Mexico City?

MOYERS: This Indian boy was saying there is a shining point where all lines intersect.

CAMPBELL: That’s exactly what he was saying.

MOYERS: And he was saying God has no circumference?

CAMPBELL: There is a definition of God which has been repeated by many philosophers. God is an intelligible sphere—a sphere known to the mind, not to the senses—whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. And the center, Bill, is right where you’re sitting. And the other one is right where I’m sitting. And each of us is a manifestation of that mystery. That’s a nice mythological realization that sort of gives you a sense of who and what you are.

MOYERS: So it’s a metaphor, an image of reality.

CAMPBELL: Yes. What you have here is what might be translated into raw individualism, you see, if you didn’t realize that the center was also right there facing you in the other person. This is the mythological way of being an individual. You are the central mountain, and the central mountain is everywhere.