V

THE HERO’S
ADVENTURE

MOYERS: Why are there so many stories of the hero in mythology?

CAMPBELL: Because that’s what’s worth writing about. Even in popular novels, the main character is a hero or heroine who has found or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

MOYERS: So in all of these cultures, whatever the local costume the hero might be wearing, what is the deed?

CAMPBELL: Well, there are two types of deed. One is the physical deed, in which the hero performs a courageous act in battle or saves a life. The other kind is the spiritual deed, in which the hero learns to experience the supernormal range of human spiritual life and then comes back with a message.

The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there’s something lacking in the normal experiences available or permitted to the members of his society. This person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It’s usually a cycle, a going and a returning.

But the structure and something of the spiritual sense of this adventure can be seen already anticipated in the puberty or initiation rituals of early tribal societies, through which a child is compelled to give up its childhood and become an adult—to die, you might say, to its infantile personality and psyche and come back as a responsible adult. This is a fundamental psychological transformation that everyone has to undergo. We are in childhood in a condition of dependency under someone’s protection and supervision for some fourteen to twenty-one years—and if you’re going on for your Ph. D., this may continue to perhaps thirty-five. You are in no way a self-responsible, free agent, but an obedient dependent, expecting and receiving punishments and rewards. To evolve out of this position of psychological immaturity to the courage of self-responsibility and assurance requires a death and a resurrection. That’s the basic motif of the universal hero’s journey—leaving one condition and finding the source of life to bring you forth into a richer or mature condition.

MOYERS: So even if we happen not to be heroes in the grand sense of redeeming society, we still have to take that journey inside ourselves, spiritually and psychologically.

CAMPBELL: That’s right. Otto Rank in his important little book The Myth of the Birth of the Hero declares that everyone is a hero in birth, where he undergoes a tremendous psychological as well as physical transformation, from the condition of a little water creature living in a realm of amniotic fluid into an air-breathing mammal which ultimately will be standing. That’s an enormous transformation, and had it been consciously undertaken, it would have been, indeed, a heroic act. And there was a heroic act on the mother’s part, as well, who had brought this all about.

MOYERS: Then heroes are not all men?

CAMPBELL: Oh, no. The male usually has the more conspicuous role, just because of the conditions of life. He is out there in the world, and the woman is in the home. But among the Aztecs, for example, who had a number of heavens to which people’s souls would be assigned according to the conditions of their death, the heaven for warriors killed in battle was the same for mothers who died in childbirth. Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is the giving over of oneself to the life of another.

MOYERS: Don’t you think we’ve lost that truth in this society of ours, where it’s deemed more heroic to go out into the world and make a lot of money than it is to raise children?

CAMPBELL: Making money gets more advertisement. You know the old saying: if a dog bites a man, that’s not a story, but if a man bites a dog, you’ve got a story there. So the thing that happens and happens and happens, no matter how heroic it may be, is not news. Motherhood has lost its novelty, you might say.

MOYERS: That’s a wonderful image, though—the mother as hero.

CAMPBELL: It has always seemed so to me. That’s something I learned from reading these myths.

MOYERS: It’s a journey—you have to move out of the known, conventional safety of your life to undertake this.

CAMPBELL: You have to be transformed from a maiden to a mother. That’s a big change, involving many dangers.

MOYERS: And when you come back from your journey, with the child, you’ve brought something for the world.

CAMPBELL: Not only that, you’ve got a life job ahead of you. Otto Rank makes the point that there is a world of people who think that their heroic act in being born qualifies them for the respect and support of their whole community.

MOYERS: But there’s still a journey to be taken after that.

CAMPBELL: There’s a large journey to be taken, of many trials.

MOYERS: What’s the significance of the trials, and tests, and ordeals of the hero?

CAMPBELL: If you want to put it in terms of intentions, the trials are designed to see to it that the intending hero should be really a hero. Is he really a match for this task? Can he overcome the dangers? Does he have the courage, the knowledge, the capacity, to enable him to serve?

MOYERS: In this culture of easy religion, cheaply achieved, it seems to me we’ve forgotten that all three of the great religions teach that the trials of the hero journey are a significant part of life, that there’s no reward without renunciation, without paying the price. The Koran says, “Do you think that you shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed before you?” And Jesus said in the gospel of Matthew, “Great is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth to life, and few there be who find it.” And the heroes of the Jewish tradition undergo great tests before they arrive at their redemption.

CAMPBELL: If you realize what the real problem is—losing yourself, giving yourself to some higher end, or to another—you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial. When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.

And what all the myths have to deal with is transformations of consciousness of one kind or another. You have been thinking one way, you now have to think a different way.

MOYERS: How is consciousness transformed?

CAMPBELL: Either by the trials themselves or by illuminating revelations. Trials and revelations are what it’s all about.

MOYERS: Isn’t there a moment of redemption in all of these stories? The woman is saved from the dragon, the city is spared from obliteration, the hero is snatched from danger in the nick of time.

CAMPBELL: Well, yes. There would be no hero deed unless there were an achievement. We can have the hero who fails, but he’s usually represented as a kind of clown, someone pretending to more than he can achieve.

MOYERS: How is a hero different from a leader?

CAMPBELL: That is a problem Tolstoy dealt with in War and Peace. Here you have Napoleon ravaging Europe and now about to invade Russia, and Tolstoy raises this question: Is the leader really a leader, or is he simply the one out in front on a wave? In psychological terms, the leader might be analyzed as the one who perceived what could be achieved and did it.

MOYERS: It has been said that a leader is someone who discerned the inevitable and got in front of it. Napoleon was a leader, but he wasn’t a hero in the sense that what he accomplished was grand for humanity’s sake. It was for France, the glory of France.

CAMPBELL: Then he is a French hero, is he not? This is the problem for today. Is the hero of a given state or people what we need today, when the whole planet should be our field of concern? Napoleon is the nineteenth-century counterpart of Hitler in the twentieth. Napoleon’s ravaging of Europe was horrific.

MOYERS: So you could be a local god and fail the test on a larger cosmic level?

CAMPBELL: Yes. Or you could be a local god, but for the people whom that local god conquered, you could be the enemy. Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be.

MOYERS: So we have to be careful not to call a deed heroic when, in a larger, mythological sense, it simply doesn’t work that way.

CAMPBELL: Well, I don’t know. The deed could be absolutely a heroic deed—a person giving his life for his own people, for example.

MOYERS: Ah, yes. The German soldier who dies—

CAMPBELL: —is as much a hero as the American who was sent over there to kill him.

MOYERS: So does heroism have a moral objective?

CAMPBELL: The moral objective is that of saving a people, or saving a person, or supporting an idea. The hero sacrifices himself for something—that’s the morality of it. Now, from another position, of course, you might say that the idea for which he sacrificed himself was something that should not have been respected. That’s a judgment from the other side, but it doesn’t destroy the intrinsic heroism of the deed performed.

MOYERS: That’s a different angle on heroes from what I got as a young boy, when I read the story of Prometheus going after fire and bringing it back, benefiting humanity and suffering for it.

CAMPBELL: Yes, Prometheus brings fire to mankind and consequently civilization. The fire theft, by the way, is a universal mythic theme. Often, it’s a trickster animal or bird that steals the fire and then passes it along to a relay team of birds or animals who run with it. Sometimes the animals are burned by the flames as they pass the fire along, and this is said to account for their different colorings. The fire theft is a very popular, worldwide story.

MOYERS: The people in each culture are trying to explain where fire came from?

CAMPBELL: The story isn’t really trying to explain it, it has to do more with the value of fire. The fire theft sets man apart from the animals. When you’re in the woods at night, you light a fire, and that keeps the animals away. You can see their eyes shining, but they’re outside the fire range.

MOYERS: So they’re not telling the story just to inspire others or to make a moral point.

CAMPBELL: No, it’s to evaluate the fire, its importance to us, and to say something about what has set man apart from the beasts.

MOYERS: Does your study of mythology lead you to conclude that a single human quest, a standard pattern of human aspiration and thought, constitutes for all mankind something that we have in common, whether we lived a million years ago or will live a thousand years from now?

CAMPBELL: There’s a certain type of myth which one might call the vision quest, going in quest of a boon, a vision, which has the same form in every mythology. That is the thing that I tried to present in the first book I wrote, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. All these different mythologies give us the same essential quest. You leave the world that you’re in and go into a depth or into a distance or up to a height. There you come to what was missing in your consciousness in the world you formerly inhabited. Then comes the problem either of staying with that, and letting the world drop off, or returning with that boon and trying to hold on to it as you move back into your social world again. That’s not an easy thing to do.

MOYERS: So the hero goes for something, he doesn’t just go along for the ride, he’s not simply an adventurer?

CAMPBELL: There are both kinds of heroes, some that choose to undertake the journey and some that don’t. In one kind of adventure, the hero sets out responsibly and intentionally to perform the deed. For instance, Odysseus’ son Telemachus was told by Athena, “Go find your father.” That father quest is a major hero adventure for young people. That is the adventure of finding what your career is, what your nature is, what your source is. You undertake that intentionally. Or there is the legend of the Sumerian sky goddess, Inanna, who descended into the underworld and underwent death to bring her beloved back to life.

Then there are adventures into which you are thrown—for example, being drafted into the army. You didn’t intend it, but you’re in now. You’ve undergone a death and resurrection, you’ve put on a uniform, and you’re another creature.

One kind of hero that often appears in Celtic myths is the princely hunter, who has followed the lure of a deer into a range of forest that he has never been in before. The animal there undergoes a transformation, becoming the Queen of the Faerie Hills, or something of that kind. This is a type of adventure in which the hero has no idea what he is doing but suddenly finds himself in a transformed realm.

MOYERS: Is the adventurer who takes that kind of trip a hero in the mythological sense?

CAMPBELL: Yes, because he is always ready for it. In these stories, the adventure that the hero is ready for is the one he gets. The adventure is symbolically a manifestation of his character. Even the landscape and the conditions of the environment match his readiness.

MOYERS: In George Lucas’ Star Wars, Solo begins as a mercenary and ends up a hero, coming in at the last to save Luke Skywalker.

CAMPBELL: Yes. There Solo has done the hero act of sacrificing himself for another.

MOYERS: Do you think that a hero is created out of guilt? Was Solo guilty because he had abandoned Skywalker?

CAMPBELL: It depends on what system of ideas you want to apply. Solo was a very practical guy, at least as he thought of himself, a materialist. But he was a compassionate human being at the same time and didn’t know it. The adventure evoked a quality of his character that he hadn’t known he possessed.

MOYERS: So perhaps the hero lurks in each one of us when we don’t know it?

CAMPBELL: Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That’s why it’s good to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower. “Lead us not into temptation.”

Ortega y Gasset talks about the environment and the hero in his Meditations on Don Quixote. Don Quixote was the last hero of the Middle Ages. He rode out to encounter giants, but instead of giants, his environment produced windmills. Ortega points out that this story takes place about the time that a mechanistic interpretation of the world came in, so that the environment was no longer spiritually responsive to the hero. The hero is today running up against a hard world that is in no way responsive to his spiritual need.

MOYERS: A windmill.

CAMPBELL: Yes, but Quixote saved the adventure for himself by inventing a magician who had just transformed the giants he had gone forth to encounter into windmills. You can do that, too, if you have a poetic imagination. Earlier, though, it was not a mechanistic world in which the hero moved but a world alive and responsive to his spiritual readiness. Now it has become to such ah extent a sheerly mechanistic world, as interpreted through our physical sciences, Marxist sociology, and behavioristic psychology, that we’re nothing but a predictable pattern of wires responding to stimuli. This nineteenth-century interpretation has squeezed the freedom of the human will out of modern life.

MOYERS: In the political sense, is there a danger that these myths of heroes teach us to look at the deeds of others as if we were in an amphitheater or coliseum or a movie, watching others perform great deeds while consoling ourselves to impotence?

CAMPBELL: I think this is something that has overtaken us only recently in this culture. The one who watches athletic games instead of participating in athletics is involved in a surrogate achievement. But when you think about what people are actually undergoing in our civilization, you realize it’s a very grim thing to be a modern human being. The drudgery of the lives of most of the people who have to support families—well, it’s a life-extinguishing affair.

MOYERS: But I think I would take that to the plagues of the twelfth century and the fourteenth century—

CAMPBELL: Their mode of life was much more active than ours. We sit in offices. It’s significant that in our civilization the problem of the middle-aged is conspicuous.

MOYERS: You’re beginning to get personal!

CAMPBELL: I’m beyond middle age, so I know a little bit about this. Something that’s characteristic of our sedentary lives is that there is or may be intellectual excitement, but the body is not in it very much. So you have to engage intentionally in mechanical exercises, the daily dozen and so forth. I find it very difficult to enjoy such things, but there it is. Otherwise, your whole body says to you, “Look, you’ve forgotten me entirely. I’m becoming just a clogged stream.”

MOYERS: Still, it’s feasible to me that these stories of heroes could become sort of a tranquilizer, invoking in us the benign passivity of watching instead of acting. And the other side of it is that our world seems drained of spiritual values. People feel impotent. To me, that’s the curse of modern society, the impotence, the ennui that people feel, the alienation of people from the world order around them. Maybe we need some hero who will give voice to our deeper longing.

CAMPBELL: This is exactly T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that you are describing, a sociological stagnation of inauthentic lives and living that has settled upon us, and that evokes nothing of our spiritual life, our potentialities, or even our physical courage—until, of course, it gets us into one of its inhuman wars.

MOYERS: You’re not against technology, are you?

CAMPBELL: Not at all. When Daedalus, who can be thought of as the master technician of most ancient Greece, put the wings he had made on his son Icarus, so that he might fly out of and escape from the Cretan labyrinth which he himself had invented, he said to him: “Fly the middle way. Don’t fly too high, or the sun will melt the wax on your wings, and you will fall. Don’t fly too low, or the tides of the sea will catch you.” Daedalus himself flew the middle way, but he watched his son become ecstatic and fly too high. The wax melted, and the boy fell into the sea. For some reason, people talk more about Icarus than about Daedalus, as though the wings themselves had been responsible for the young astronaut’s fall. But that is no case against industry and science. Poor Icarus fell into the water—but Daedalus, who flew the middle way, succeeded in getting to the other shore.

A Hindu text says, “A dangerous path is this, like the edge of a razor.” This is a motif that occurs in medieval literature, also. When Lancelot goes to rescue Guinevere from captivity, he has to cross a stream on a sword’s edge with his bare hands and feet, a torrent flowing underneath. When you are doing something that is a brand-new adventure, breaking new ground, whether it is something like a technological breakthrough or simply a way of living that is not what the community can help you with, there’s always the danger of too much enthusiasm, of neglecting certain mechanical details. Then you fall off. “A dangerous path is this.” When you follow the path of your desire and enthusiasm and emotion, keep your mind in control, and don’t let it pull you compulsively into disaster.

MOYERS: One of the intriguing points of your scholarship is that you do not believe science and mythology conflict.

CAMPBELL: No, they don’t conflict. Science is breaking through now into the mystery dimensions. It’s pushed itself into the sphere the myth is talking about. It’s come to the edge.

MOYERS: The edge being—

CAMPBELL: —the edge, the interface between what can be known and what is never to be discovered because it is a mystery that transcends all human research. The source of life—what is it? No one knows. We don’t even know what an atom is, whether it is a wave or a particle—it is both. We don’t have any idea of what these things are.

That’s the reason we speak of the divine. There’s a transcendent energy source. When the physicist observes subatomic particles, he’s seeing a trace on a screen. These traces come and go, come and go, and we come and go, and all of life comes and goes. That energy is the informing energy of all things. Mythic worship is addressed to that.

MOYERS: Do you have a favorite mythic hero?

CAMPBELL: When I was a boy, I had two heroes. One was Douglas Fairbanks; the other was Leonardo da Vinci. I wanted to be a synthesis of the two. Today, I don’t have a single hero at all.

MOYERS: Does our society?

CAMPBELL: It did have. It had the Christ. And then America had men like Washington and Jefferson and, later, men like Daniel Boone. But life today is so complex, and it is changing so fast, that there is no time for anything to constellate itself before it’s thrown over again.

MOYERS: We seem to worship celebrities today, not heroes.

CAMPBELL: Yes, and that’s too bad. A questionnaire was once sent around one of the high schools in Brooklyn which asked, “What would you like to be?” Two thirds of the students responded, “A celebrity.” They had no notion of having to give of themselves in order to achieve something.

MOYERS: Just to be known.

CAMPBELL: Just to be known, to have fame—name and fame. It’s too bad.

MOYERS: But does a society need heroes?

CAMPBELL: Yes, I think so.

MOYERS: Why?

CAMPBELL: Because it has to have constellating images to pull together all these tendencies to separation, to pull them together into some intention.

MOYERS: To follow some path.

CAMPBELL: I think so. The nation has to have an intention somehow to operate as a single power.

MOYERS: What did you think of the outpouring over John Lennon’s death? Was he a hero?

CAMPBELL: Oh, he definitely was a hero.

MOYERS: Explain that in the mythological sense.

CAMPBELL: In the mythological sense, he was an innovator. The Beatles brought forth an art form for which there was a readiness. Somehow, they were in perfect tune with their time. Had they turned up thirty years before, their music would have fizzled out. The public hero is sensitive to the needs of his time. The Beatles brought a new spiritual depth into popular music which started the fad, let’s call it, for meditation and Oriental music. Oriental music had been over here for years, as a curiosity, but now, after the Beatles, our young people seem to know what it’s about. We are hearing more and more of it, and it’s being used in terms of its original intention as a support for meditations. That’s what the Beatles started.

MOYERS: Sometimes it seems to me that we ought to feel pity for the hero instead of admiration. So many of them have sacrificed their own needs for others.

CAMPBELL: They all have.

MOYERS: And very often what they accomplish is shattered by the inability of the followers to see.

CAMPBELL: Yes, you come out of the forest with gold and it turns to ashes. That’s a well-known fairy-tale motif.

MOYERS: There’s that haunting incident in the story of Odysseus, when the ship tears apart and the members of the crew are thrown overboard, and the waves toss Odysseus over. He clings to a mast and finally lands on shore, and the text says, “Alone at last. Alone at last.”

CAMPBELL: Well, that adventure of Odysseus is a little complicated to try to talk about very briefly. But that particular adventure where the ship is wrecked is at the Island of the Sun—that’s the island of highest illumination. If the ship had not been wrecked, Odysseus might have remained on the island and become, you might say, the sort of yogi who, on achieving full enlightenment, remains there in bliss and never returns. But the Greek idea of making the values known and enacted in life brings him back. Now, there was a taboo on the Island of the Sun, namely, that one should not kill and eat any of the oxen of the Sun. Odysseus’ men, however, were hungry, so they slaughtered the cattle of the Sun, which is what brought about their shipwreck. The lower consciousness was still functioning while they were up there in the sphere of the highest spiritual light. When you’re in the presence of such an illumination, you are not to think, “Gee, I’m hungry. Get me a roast beef sandwich.” Odysseus’ men were not ready or eligible for the experience which had been given to them.

That’s a model story of the earthly hero’s attaining to the highest illumination but then coming back.

MOYERS: What are we to make of what you wrote of the bittersweet story of Odysseus when you said, “The tragic sense of that work lies precisely in its deep joy in life’s beauty and excellence—the noble loveliness of fair woman, the real worth of manly men. Yet the end of the tale is ashes.”

CAMPBELL: You can’t say life is useless because it ends in the grave. There’s an inspiring line in one of Pindar’s poems where he is celebrating a young man who has just won a wrestling championship at the Pythian games. Pindar writes, “Creatures of a day, what is any one? What is he not? Man is but a dream of a shadow. Yet when there comes as a gift of heaven a gleam of sunshine, there rests upon men a radiant light and, aye, a gentle life.” That dismal saying, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!”—it is not all vanity. This moment itself is no vanity, it is a triumph, a delight. This accent on the culmination of perfection in our moments of triumph is very Greek.

MOYERS: Don’t many of the heroes in mythology die to the world? They suffer, they’re crucified.

CAMPBELL: Many of them give their lives. But then the myth also says that out of the given life comes a new life. It may not be the hero’s life, but it’s a new life, a new way of being or becoming.

MOYERS: These stories of the hero vary from culture to culture. Is the hero from the East different from the hero in our culture?

CAMPBELL: It’s the degree of the illumination or action that makes them different. There is a typical early culture hero who goes around slaying monsters. Now, that is a form of adventure from the period of prehistory when man was shaping his world out of a dangerous, unshaped wilderness. He goes about killing monsters.

MOYERS: So the hero evolves over time like most other concepts and ideas?

CAMPBELL: He evolves as the culture evolves. Moses is a hero figure, for example. He ascends the mountain, he meets with Yahweh on the summit of the mountain, and he comes back with rules for the formation of a whole new society. That’s a typical hero act—departure, fulfillment, return.

MOYERS; Is Buddha a hero figure?

CAMPBELL: The Buddha follows a path very much like that of Christ; only of course the Buddha lived five hundred years earlier. You can match those two savior figures right down the line, even to the roles and characters of their immediate disciples or apostles. You can parallel, for example, Ananda and St. Peter.

MOYERS: Why did you call your book The Hero with a Thousand Faces?

CAMPBELL: Because there is a certain typical hero sequence of actions which can be detected in stories from all over the world and from many periods of history. Essentially, it might even be said there is but one archetypal mythic hero whose life has been replicated in many lands by many, many people. A legendary hero is usually the founder of something—the founder of a new age, the founder of a new religion, the founder of a new city, the founder of a new way of life. In order to found something new, one has to leave the old and go in quest of the seed idea, a germinal idea that will have the potentiality of bringing forth that new thing.

The founders of all religions have gone on quests like that. The Buddha went into solitude and then sat beneath the bo tree, the tree of immortal knowledge, where he received an illumination that has enlightened all of Asia for twenty-five hundred years.

After baptism by John the Baptist, Jesus went into the desert for forty days; and it was out of that desert that he came with his message. Moses went to the top of a mountain and came down with the tables of the law. Then you have the one who founds a new city—almost all the old Greek cities were founded by heroes who went off on quests and had surprising adventures, out of which each then founded a city. You might also say that the founder of a life—your life or mine, if we live our own lives, instead of imitating everybody else’s life—comes from a quest as well.

MOYERS: Why are these stories so important to the human race?

CAMPBELL: It depends on what kind of story it is. If the story represents what might be called an archetypal adventure—the story of a child becoming a youth, or the awakening to the new world that opens at adolescence—it would help to provide a model for handling this development.

MOYERS: You talk about how stories help us through crises. When I read them as a child, they all had happy endings. It was a time before I learned that life is fraught with plodding, indulgent, and cruel realities. Sometimes I think we buy a ticket to Gilbert and Sullivan, and when we go into the theater, we find the play is by Harold Pinter. Maybe fairy tales make us misfits to reality.

CAMPBELL: Fairy tales are told for entertainment. You’ve got to distinguish between the myths that have to do with the serious matter of living life in terms of the order of society and of nature, and stories with some of those same motifs that are told for entertainment. But even though there’s a happy ending for most fairy tales, on the way to the happy ending, typical mythological motifs occur—for example, the motif of being in deep trouble and then hearing a voice or having somebody come to help you out.

Fairy tales are for children. Very often they’re about a little girl who doesn’t want to grow up to be a woman. At the crisis of that threshold crossing she’s balking. So she goes to sleep until the prince comes through all the barriers and gives her a reason to think it might be nice on the other side after all. Many of the Grimm tales represent the little girl who is stuck. All of these dragon killings and threshold crossings have to do with getting past being stuck.

The rituals of primitive initiation ceremonies are all mythologically grounded and have to do with killing the infantile ego and bringing forth an adult, whether it’s the girl or the boy. It’s harder for the boy than for the girl, because life overtakes the girl. She becomes a woman whether she intends it or not, but the little boy has to intend to be a man. At the first menstruation, the girl is a woman. The next thing she knows, she’s pregnant, she’s a mother. The boy first has to disengage himself from his mother, get his energy into himself, and then start forth. That’s what the myth of “Young man, go find your father” is all about. In the Odyssey, Telemachus lives with his mother. When he’s twenty years old, Athena comes and says, “Go find your father.” That is the theme all through the stories. Sometimes it’s a mystical father, but sometimes, as here in the Odyssey, it’s the physical father.

A fairy tale is the child’s myth. There are proper myths for proper times of life. As you grow older, you need a sturdier mythology. Of course, the whole story of the crucifixion, which is a fundamental image in the Christian tradition, speaks of the coming of eternity into the field of time and space, where there is dismemberment. But it also speaks of the passage from the field of time and space into the field of eternal life. So we crucify our temporal and earthly bodies, let them be torn, and through that dismemberment enter the spiritual sphere which transcends all the pains of earth. There’s a form of the crucifix known as “Christ Triumphant,” where he is not with head bowed and blood pouring from him, but with head erect and eyes open, as though having come voluntarily to the crucifixion. St. Augustine has written somewhere that Jesus went to the cross as a bride-groom to his bride.

MOYERS: So there are truths for older age and truths for children.

CAMPBELL: Oh, yes. I remember the time Heinrich Zimmer was lecturing at Columbia on the Hindu idea that all life is as a dream or a bubble; that all is maya, illusion. After his lecture a young woman came up to him and said, “Dr. Zimmer, that was a wonderful lecture on Indian philosophy! But maya—I don’t get it—it doesn’t speak to me.”

“Oh,” he said, “don’t be impatient! That’s not for you yet, darling.” And so it is: when you get older, and everyone you’ve known and originally lived for has passed away, and the world itself is passing, the maya myth comes in. But, for young people, the world is something yet to be met and dealt with and loved and learned from and fought with—and so, another mythology.

MOYERS: The writer Thomas Berry says that it’s all a question of story. The story is the plot we assign to life and the universe, our basic assumptions and fundamental beliefs about how things work. He says we are in trouble now “because we are in between stories. The old story sustained us for a long time—it shaped our emotional attitudes, it provided us with life’s purpose, it energized our actions, it consecrated suffering, it guided education. We awoke in the morning and knew who we were, we could answer the questions of our children. Everything was taken cate of because the story was there. Now the old story is not functioning. And we have not yet learned a new.”

CAMPBELL: I’m in partial agreement with that—partial because there is an old story that is still good, and that is the story of the spiritual quest. The quest to find the inward thing that you basically are is the story that I tried to render in that little book of mine written forty-odd years ago—The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The relationship of myths to cosmology and sociology has got to wait for man to become used to the new world that he is in. The world is different today from what it was fifty years ago. But the inward life of man is exactly the same. So if you put aside for a while the myth of the origin of the world—scientists will tell you what that is, anyway—and go back to the myth of what is the human quest, what are its stages of realization, what are the trials of the transition from childhood to maturity and what does maturity mean, the story is there, as it is in all the religions.

The story of Jesus, for example—there’s a universally valid hero deed represented in the story of Jesus. First he goes to the edge of the consciousness of his time when he goes to John the Baptist to be baptized. Then he goes past the threshold into the desert for forty days. In the Jewish tradition the number forty is mythologically significant. The children of Israel spent forty years in the wilderness, Jesus spent forty days in the desert. In the desert, Jesus underwent three temptations. First there was the economic temptation, where the Devil comes to him and says, “You look hungry, young man! Why not change these stones to bread?” And Jesus replies, “Man lives not by bread alone, but by every word out of the mouth of God.” And then next we have the political temptation. Jesus is taken to the top of a mountain and shown the nations of the world, and the Devil says to him, “You can control all these if you’ll bow down to me,” which is a lesson, not well enough made known today, of what it takes to be a successful politician. Jesus refuses. Finally the Devil says, “And so now, you’re so spiritual, let’s go up to the top of Herod’s Temple and let me see you cast yourself down. God will bear you up, and you won’t even be bruised.” This is what is known as spiritual inflation. I’m so spiritual, I’m above concerns of the flesh and this earth. But Jesus is incarnate, is he not? So he says, “You shall not tempt the Lord, your God.” Those are the three temptations of Christ, and they are as relevant today as they were in the year A.D. 30.

The Buddha, too, goes into the forest and has conferences there with the leading gurus of his day. Then he goes past them and, after a season of trials and search, comes to the bo tree, the tree of illumination, where he, likewise, undergoes three temptations. The first is of lust, the second of fear, and the third of submission to public opinion, doing as told.

In the first temptation, the Lord of Lust displayed his three beautiful daughters before the Buddha. Their names were Desire, Fulfillment, and Regrets—Future, Present, and Past. But the Buddha, who had already disengaged himself from attachment to his sensual character, was not moved.

Then the Lord of Lust turned himself into the Lord of Death and flung at the Buddha all the weapons of an army of monsters. But the Buddha had found in himself that still point within, which is of eternity, untouched by time. So again, he was not moved, and the weapons flung at him turned into flowers of worship.

Finally the Lord of Lust and Death transformed himself into the Lord of Social Duty and argued, “Young man, haven’t you read the morning papers? Don’t you know what there is to be done today?” The Buddha responded by simply touching the earth with the tips of the fingers of his right hand. Then the voice of the goddess mother of the universe was heard, like thunder rolling on the horizon, saying, “This, my beloved son, has already so given of himself to the world that there is no one here to be ordered about. Give up this nonsense.” Whereupon the elephant on which the Lord of Social Duty was riding bowed in worship of the Buddha, and the entire company of the Antagonist dissolved like a dream. That night, the Buddha achieved illumination, and for the next fifty years remained in the world as teacher of the way to the extinction of the bondages of egoism.

Now, those first two temptations—of desire and of fear—are the same that Adam and Eve are shown to have experienced in the extraordinary painting by Titian (now in the Prado), conceived when he was ninety-four years old. The tree is, of course, the mythological world axis, at the point where time and eternity, movement and rest, are at one, and around which all things revolve. It is here represented only in its temporal aspect, as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, profit and loss, desire and fear. At the right is Eve, who sees the tempter in the form of a child, offering the apple, and she is moved by desire. Adam, however, from the opposite point of view, sees the serpent-legs of the ambiguous tempter and is touched with fear. Desire and fear: these are the two emotions by which all life in the world is governed. Desire is the bait, death is the hook.

Adam and Eve were moved; the Buddha was not. Eve and Adam brought forth life and were cursed of God; the Buddha taught release from life’s fear.

MOYERS: And yet with the child—with life—come danger, fear, suffering?

CAMPBELL: Here I am now, in my eighties, and I’m writing a work that is to be of several volumes. I want very much to live until I finish this work. I want that child. So that puts me in fear of death. If I had no desire to complete that book, I wouldn’t mind dying. Now, both the Buddha and Christ found salvation beyond death, and returned from the wilderness to choose and instruct disciples, who then brought their message to the world.

The messages of the great teachers—Moses, the Buddha, Christ, Mohammed—differ greatly. But their visionary journeys are much the same. At the time of his election, Mohammed was an illiterate camel-caravan master. But every day he would leave his home in Mecca and go out to a mountain cave to meditate. One day a voice called to him, “Write!” and he listened, and we have the Koran. It’s an old, old story.

MOYERS: In each case receivers of the boon have done some rather grotesque things with their interpretation of the hero’s message.

CAMPBELL: There are some teachers who decide they won’t teach at all because of what society will do with what they’ve found.

MOYERS: What if the hero returns from his ordeal, and the world doesn’t want what he brings back?

CAMPBELL: That, of course, is a normal experience. It isn’t always so much that the world doesn’t want the gift, but that it doesn’t know how to receive it and how to institutionalize it—

MOYERS: —how to keep it, how to renew it.

CAMPBELL: Yes, how to help keep it going.

MOYERS: I’ve always liked that image of life being breathed back into the dry bones, back into the ruins and the relics.

CAMPBELL: There is a kind of secondary hero to revitalize the tradition. This hero reinterprets the tradition and makes it valid as a living experience today instead of a lot of outdated clichés. This has to be done with all traditions.

MOYERS: So many of the religions began with their own hero stories. The whole of the Orient has been blessed with the teaching of the good law brought back by Buddha, and the Occident has been blessed by the laws Moses brought back from Sinai. The tribal or local heroes perform their deeds for a single folk, and universal heroes like Mohammed, Jesus, and Buddha bring the message from afar. These heroes of religion came back with the wonder of God, not with a blueprint of God,

CAMPBELL: Well, you find an awful lot of laws in the Old Testament.

MOYERS: But that’s the transformation of religion to theology. Religion begins with the sense of wonder and awe and the attempt to tell stories that will connect us to God. Then it becomes a set of theological works in which everything is reduced to a code, to a creed.

CAMPBELL: That’s the reduction of mythology to theology. Mythology is very fluid. Most of the myths are self-contradictory. You may even find four or five myths in a given culture, all giving different versions of the same mystery. Then theology comes along and says it has got to be just this way. Mythology is poetry, and the poetic language is very flexible.

Religion turns poetry into prose. God is literally up there, and this is literally what he thinks, and this is the way you’ve got to behave to get into proper relationship with that god up there.

MOYERS: You don’t have to believe that there was a King Arthur to get the significance of those stories, but Christians say we have to believe there was a Christ, or the miracles don’t make sense.

CAMPBELL: They are the same miracles that Elijah performed. There’s a whole body of miracles that float, like particles in the air, and a man of a certain type of achievement comes along, and all these things cluster around him. These stories of miracles let us know simply that this remarkable man preached of a spiritual order that is not to be identified with the merely physical order, so he could perform spiritual magic. It doesn’t follow that he actually did any of these things, although of course it’s possible. Three or four times I’ve seen what appear to be magical effects occur: men and women of power can do things that you wouldn’t think possible. We don’t really know what the limits of the possible might be. But the miracles of legend need not necessarily have been facts. The Buddha walked on water, as did Jesus. The Buddha ascended to heaven and returned.

MOYERS: I remember a lecture in which you drew a circle, and you said, “That’s your soul.”

CAMPBELL: Well, that was simply a pedagogical stunt. Plato has said somewhere that the soul is a circle. I took this idea to suggest on the blackboard the whole sphere of the psyche. Then I drew a horizontal line across the circle to represent the line of separation of the conscious and unconscious. The center from which all our energy comes I represented as a dot in the center of the circle, below the horizontal line. An infant has no intention that doesn’t come from its own little body requirements. That’s the way life begins. An infant is mostly the impulse of life. Then the mind comes along and has to figure out what it’s all about, what is it I want? And how do I get it?

Now, above the horizontal line there is the ego, which I represent as a square: that aspect of our consciousness that we identify as our center. But, you see, it’s very much off center. We think that this is what’s running the show, but it isn’t.

MOYERS: What’s running the show?

CAMPBELL: What’s running the show is what’s coming up from way down below. The period when one begins to realize that one isn’t running the show is adolescence, when a whole new system of requirements begins announcing itself from the body. The adolescent hasn’t the slightest idea how to handle all this, and cannot but wonder what it is that’s pushing him—or even more mysteriously, pushing her.

MOYERS: It seems fairly evident that we arrive here as infants with some kind of memory box down there.

CAMPBELL: Well, it’s surprising how much memory there is down there. The infant knows what to do when a nipple’s in its mouth. There is a whole system of built-in action which, when we see it in animals, we call instinct. That is the biological ground. But then certain things can happen that make it repulsive or difficult or frightening or sinful to do some of the things that one is impelled to do, and that is when we begin to have our most troublesome psychological problems.

Myths primarily are for fundamental instruction in these matters. Our society today is not giving us adequate mythic instruction of this kind, and so young people are finding it difficult to get their act together. I have a theory that, if you can find out where a person is blocked, it should be possible to find a mythological counterpart for that particular threshold problem.

MOYERS: We hear people say, “Get in touch with yourself.” What do you take that to mean?

CAMPBELL: It’s quite possible to be so influenced by the ideals and commands of your neighborhood that you don’t know what you really want and could be. I think that anyone brought up in an extremely strict, authoritative social situation is unlikely ever to come to the knowledge of himself.

MOYERS: Because you’re told what to do.

CAMPBELL: You’re told exactly what to do, every bit of the time. You’re in the army now. So this is what we do here. As a child in school, you’re always doing what you’re told to do, and so you count the days to your holidays, since that’s when you’re going to be yourself.

MOYERS: What does mythology tell us about how to get in touch with that other self, that real self?

CAMPBELL: The first instruction would be to follow the hints of the myth itself and of your guru, your teacher, who should know. It’s like an athlete going to a coach. The coach tells him how to bring his own energies into play. A good coach doesn’t tell a runner exactly how to hold his arms or anything like that. He watches him run, then helps him to correct his own natural mode. A good teacher is there to watch the young person and recognize what the possibilities are—then to give advice, not commands. The command would be, “This is the way I do it, so you must do it this way, too.” Some artists teach their students that way. But the teacher in any case has to talk it out, to give some general clues. If you don’t have someone to do that for you, you’ve got to work it all out from scratch—like reinventing the wheel.

A good way to learn is to find a book that seems to be dealing with the problems that you’re now dealing with. That will certainly give you some clues. In my own life I took my instruction from reading Thomas Mann and James Joyce, both of whom had applied basic mythological themes to the interpretation of the problems, questions, realizations, and concerns of young men growing up in the modern world. You can discover your own guiding-myth motifs through the works of a good novelist who himself understands these things.

MOYERS: That’s what intrigues me. If we are fortunate, if the gods and muses are smiling, about every generation someone comes along to inspire the imagination for the journey each of us takes. In your day it was Joyce and Mann. In our day it often seems to be movies. Do movies create hero myths? Do you think, for example, that a movie like Star Wars fills some of that need for a model of the hero?

CAMPBELL: I’ve heard youngsters use some of George Lucas’ terms—“the Force” and “the dark side.” So it must be hitting somewhere. It’s a good sound teaching, I would say.

MOYERS: I think that explains in part the success of Star Wars. It wasn’t just the production value that made that such an exciting film to watch, it was that it came along at a time when people needed to see in recognizable images the clash of good and evil. They needed to be reminded of idealism, to see a romance based upon selflessness rather than selfishness.

CAMPBELL: The fact that the evil power is not identified with any specific nation on this earth means you’ve got an abstract power, which represents a principle, not a specific historical situation. The story has to do with an operation of principles, not of this nation against that. The monster masks that are put on people in Star Wars represent the real monster force in the modern world. When the mask of Darth Vader is removed, you see an unformed man, one who has not developed as a human individual. What you see is a strange and pitiful sort of undifferentiated face.

MOYERS: What’s the significance of that?

CAMPBELL: Darth Vader has not developed his own humanity. He’s a robot. He’s a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but in terms of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? It doesn’t help to try to change it to accord with your system of thought. The momentum of history behind it is too great for anything really significant to evolve from that kind of action. The thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being. That’s something else, and it can be done.

MOYERS By doing what?

CAMPBELL: By holding to your own ideals for yourself and, like Luke Skywalker, rejecting the system’s impersonal claims upon you.

MOYERS: When I took our two sons to see Star Wars, they did the same thing the audience did at that moment when the voice of Ben Kenobi says to Skywalker in the climactic moment of the last fight, “Turn off your computer, turn off your machine and do it yourself, follow your feelings, trust your feelings.” And when he did, he achieved success, and the audience broke out into applause.

CAMPBELL: Well, you see, that movie communicates. It is in a language that talks to young people, and that’s what counts. It asks, Are you going to be a person of heart and humanity—because that’s where the life is, from the heart—or are you going to do whatever seems to be required of you by what might be called “intentional power”? When Ben Kenobi says, “May the Force be with you,” he’s speaking of the power and energy of life, not of programmed political intentions.

MOYERS: I was intrigued by the definition of the Force. Ben Kenobi says, “The Force is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together.” And I’ve read in The Hero with a Thousand Faces similar descriptions of the world navel, of the sacred place, of the power that is at the moment of creation.

CAMPBELL: Yes, of course, the Force moves from within. But the force of the Empire is based on an intention to overcome and master. Star Wars is not a simple morality play, it has to do with the powers of life as they are either fulfilled or broken and suppressed through the action of man.

MOYERS: The first time I saw Star Wars, I thought, “This is a very old story in a very new costume.” The story of the young man called to adventure, the hero going out facing the trials and ordeals, and coming back after his victory with a boon for the community—

CAMPBELL: Certainly Lucas was using standard mythological figures. The old man as the adviser made me think of a Japanese sword master. I’ve known some of those people, and Ben Kenobi has a bit of their character.

MOYERS: What does the sword master do?

CAMPBELL: He is a total expert in swordsmanship. The Oriental cultivation of the martial arts goes beyond anything I’ve ever encountered in American gymnasiums. There is a psychological as well as a physiological technique that go together there. This character in Star Wars has that quality.

MOYERS: There’s something mythological, too, in that the hero is helped by a stranger who shows up and gives him some instrument—

CAMPBELL: He gives him not only a physical instrument but a psychological commitment and a psychological center. The commitment goes past your mere intention system. You are one with the event.

MOYERS: My favorite scene was when they were in the garbage compactor, and the walls were closing in, and I thought, “That’s like the belly of the whale that swallowed Jonah.”

CAMPBELL: That’s where they were, down in the belly of the whale.

MOYERS: What’s the mythological significance of the belly?

CAMPBELL: The belly is the dark place where digestion takes place and new energy is created. The story of Jonah in the whale is an example of a mythic theme that is practically universal, of the hero going into a fish’s belly and ultimately coming out again, transformed.

MOYERS: Why must the hero do that?

CAMPBELL: It’s a descent into the dark. Psychologically, the whale represents the power of life locked in the unconscious. Metaphorically, water is the unconscious, and the creature in the water is the life or energy of the unconscious, which has overwhelmed the conscious personality and must be disempowered, overcome and controlled.

In the first stage of this kind of adventure, the hero leaves the realm of the familiar, over which he has some measure of control, and comes to a threshold, let us say the edge of a lake or sea, where a monster of the abyss comes to meet him. There are then two possibilities. In a story of the Jonah type, the hero is swallowed and taken into the abyss to be later resurrected—a variant of the death-and-resurrection theme. The conscious personality here has come in touch with a charge of unconscious energy which it is unable to handle and must now suffer all the trails and revelations of a terrifying night-sea journey, while learning how to come to terms with this power of the dark and emerge, at last, to a new way of life.

The other possibility is that the hero, on encountering the power of the dark, may overcome and kill it, as did Siegfried and St. George when they killed the dragon. But as Siegfried learned, he must then taste the dragon blood, in order to take to himself something of that dragon power. When Siegfried has killed the dragon and tasted the blood, he hears the song of nature. He has transcended his humanity and reassociated himself with the powers of nature, which are the powers of our life, and from which our minds remove us.

You see, consciousness thinks it’s running the shop. But it’s a secondary organ of a total human being, and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body. When it does put itself in control, you get a man like Darth Vader in Star Wars, the man who goes over to the consciously intentional side.

MOYERS: The dark figure.

CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s the figure that in Goethe’s Faust is represented by Mephistopheles.

MOYERS: But I can hear someone saying, “Well, that’s all well and good for the imagination of a George Lucas or for the scholarship of a Joseph Campbell, but that isn’t what happens in my life.”

CAMPBELL: You bet it is—and if he doesn’t recognize it, it may turn him into Darth Vader. If the person insists on a certain program, and doesn’t listen to the demands of his own heart, he’s going to risk a schizophrenic crackup. Such a person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a program for life, and it’s not the one the body’s interested in at all. The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are that they should be living for.

MOYERS: Given what you know about human beings, is it conceivable that there is a port of wisdom beyond the conflicts of truth and illusion by which our lives can be put back together again? Can we develop new models?

CAMPBELL: They’re already here, in the religions. All religions have been true for their time. If you can recognize the enduring aspect of their truth and separate it from the temporal applications, you’ve got it.

We’ve spoken about it right here: the sacrifice of the physical desires and fears of the body to that which spiritually supports the body; is the body learning to know and express its own deepest life in the field of time? One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.

MOYERS: Not the first cause, but a higher cause?

CAMPBELL: I would say, a more inward cause. “Higher” is just up there, and there is no “up there.” We know that. That old man up there has been blown away. You’ve got to find the Force inside you. This is why Oriental gurus are so convincing to young people today. They say, “It is in you. Go and find it.”

MOYERS: But isn’t it only the very few who can face the challenge of a new truth and put their lives in accord with it?

CAMPBELL: Not at all! A few may be the teachers and the leaders, but this is something that anybody can respond to, just as anybody has the potential to run out to save a child. It is within everybody to recognize values in his life that are not confined to maintenance of the body and economic concerns of the day.

MOYERS: When I was a boy and read Knights of the Round Table, myth stirred me to think that I could be a hero. I wanted to go out and do battle with dragons, I wanted to go into the dark forest and slay evil. What does it say to you that myths can cause the son of an Oklahoma farmer to think of himself as a hero?

CAMPBELL: Myths inspire the realization of the possibility of your perfection, the fullness of your strength, and the bringing of solar light into the world. Slaying monsters is slaying the dark things. Myths grab you somewhere down inside. As a boy, you go at it one way, as I did reading my Indian stories. Later on, myths tell you more, and more, and still more. I think that anyone who has ever dealt seriously with religious or mythic ideas will tell you that we learn them as a child on one level, but then many different levels are revealed. Myths are infinite in their revelation.

MOYERS: How do I slay that dragon in me? What’s the journey each of us has to make, what you call “the soul’s high adventure”?

CAMPBELL: My general formula for my students is “Follow your bliss.” Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.

MOYERS: Is it my work or my life?

CAMPBELL: If the work that you’re doing is the work that you chose to do because you are enjoying it, that’s it. But if you think, “Oh, no! I couldn’t do that!” that’s the dragon locking you in. “No, no, I couldn’t be a writer,” or “No, no, I couldn’t possibly do what So-and-so is doing.”

MOYERS: In this sense, unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we’re not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves.

CAMPBELL: But in doing that, you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way t? do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.

MOYERS: When I take that journey and go down there and slay those dragons, do I have to go alone?

CAMPBELL: If you have someone who can help you, that’s fine, too. But, ultimately, the last deed has to be done by oneself. Psychologically, the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego. We’re captured in our own dragon cage. The problem of the psychiatrist is to disintegrate that dragon, break him up, so that you may expand to a larger field of relationships. The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down.

MOYERS: What’s my ego?

CAMPBELL: What you think you want, what you will to believe, what you think you can afford, what you decide to love, what you regard yourself as bound to. It may be all much too small, in which case it will nail you down. And if you simply do what your neighbors tell you to do, you’re certainly going to be nailed down. Your neighbors are then your dragon as it reflects from within yourself.

Our Western dragons represent greed. However, the Chinese dragon is different. It represents the vitality of the swamps and comes up beating its belly and bellowing, “Haw ha ha haww.” That’s a lovely kind of dragon, one that yields the bounty of the waters, a great, glorious gift. But the dragon of our Western tales tries to collect and keep everything to himself. In his secret cave he guards things: heaps of gold and perhaps a captured virgin. He doesn’t know what to do with either, so he just guards and keeps. There are people like that, and we call them creeps. There’s no life from them, no giving. They just glue themselves to you and hang around and try to suck out of you their life.

Jung had a patient who came to him because she felt herself to be alone in the world, on the rocks, and when she drew a picture for him of how she felt, there she was on the shore of a dismal sea, caught in rocks from the waist down. The wind was blowing, and her hair was blowing, and all the gold, all the joy of life, was locked away from her in the rocks. The next picture that she drew, however, followed something that he had said to her. A flash of lightning strikes the rocks, and a golden disk is being lifted out. There is no more gold locked within the rocks. There are golden patches now on the surface. In the course of the conferences that followed, these patches of gold were identified. They were her friends. She wasn’t alone. She had locked herself in her own little room and life, yet she had friends. Her recognition of these followed only after the killing of her dragon.

MOYERS: I like what you say about the old myth of Theseus and Ariande. Theseus says to Ariande, “I’ll love you forever if you can show me a way to come out of the labyrinth.” So she gives him a ball of string, which he unwinds as he goes into the labyrinth, and then follows to find the way out. You say, “All he had was the string. That’s all you need.”

CAMPBELL: That’s all you need—an Ariande thread.

MOYERS: Sometimes we look for great wealth to save us, a great power to save us, or great ideas to save us, when all we need is that piece of string.

CAMPBELL: That’s not always easy to find. But it’s nice to have someone who can give you a clue. That’s the teacher’s job, to help you find your Ariande thread.

MOYERS: Like all heroes, the Buddha doesn’t show you the truth itself, he shows you the way to truth.

CAMPBELL: But it’s got to be your way, not his. The Buddha can’t tell you exactly how to get rid of your particular fears, for example. Different teachers may suggest exercises, but they may not be the ones to work for you. All a teacher can do is suggest. He is like a lighthouse that says, “There are rocks over here, steer clear. There is a channel, however, out there.”

The big problem of any young person’s life is to have models to suggest possibilities. Nietzsche says, “Man is the sick animal.”

Man is the animal that doesn’t know what to do with itself. The mind has many possibilities, but we can live no more than one life. What are we going to do with ourselves? A living myth presents contemporary models.

MOYERS: Today, we have an endless variety of models. A lot of people end up choosing many and never knowing who they are.

CAMPBELL: When you choose your vocation, you have actually chosen a model, and it will fit you in a little while. After middle life, for example, you can pretty well tell what a person’s profession is. Wherever I go, people know I’m a professor. I don’t know what it is that I do, or how I look, but I, too, can tell professors from engineers and merchants. You’re shaped by your life.

MOYERS: There is a wonderful image in King Arthur where the knights of the Round Table are about to enter the search for the Grail in the Dark Forest, and the narrator says, “They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. So each entered the forest at a separate point of his choice.” You’ve interpreted that to express the Western emphasis upon the unique phenomenon of a single human life—the individual confronting darkness.

CAMPBELL: What struck me when I read that in the thirteenth-century Queste del Saint Graal was that it epitomizes an especially Western spiritual aim and ideal, which is, of living the life that is potential in you and was never in anyone else as a possibility.

This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s. In the traditional Orient, on the other hand, and generally in all traditionally grounded societies, the individual is cookie-molded. His duties are put upon him in exact and precise terms, and there’s no way of breaking out from them. When you go to a guru to be guided on the spiritual way, he knows just where you are on the traditional path, just where you have to go next, just what you must do to get there. He’ll give you his picture to wear, so you can be like him. That wouldn’t be a proper Western pedagogical way of guidance. We have to give our students guidance in developing their own pictures of themselves. What each must seek in his life never was, on land or sea. It is to be something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.

MOYERS: There’s the question Hamlet asked, “Are you up to your destiny?”

CAMPBELL: Hamlet’s problem was that he wasn’t. He was given a destiny too big for him to handle, and it blew him to pieces. That can happen, too.

MOYERS: Which stories from mythology help us understand death?

CAMPBELL: You don’t understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death. I would say that the story of Christ assuming the form of a human servant, even to death on the cross, is the principal lesson for us of the acceptance of death. The story of Oedipus and the Sphinx has something to say of this, too. The Sphinx in the Oedipus story is not the Egyptian Sphinx, but a female form with the wings of a bird, the body of an animal, and the breast, neck, and face of a woman. What she represents is the destiny of all life. She has sent a plague over the land, and to lift the plague, the hero has to answer the riddle that she presents: “What is it that walks on four legs, then on two legs, and then on three?” The answer is “Man.” The child creeps about on four legs, the adult walks on two, and the aged walk with a cane.

The riddle of the Sphinx is the image of life itself through time—childhood, maturity, age, and death. When without fear you have faced and accepted the riddle of the Sphinx, death has no further hold on you, and the curse of the Sphinx disappears. The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life hut as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure—fearlessness and achievement.

I remember reading as a boy of the war cry of the Indian braves riding into battle against the rain of bullets of Custer’s men. “What a wonderful day to die!” There was no hanging on there to life. That is one of the great messages of mythology. I, as I now know myself, am not the final form of my being. We must constantly die one way or another to the selfhood already achieved.

MOYERS: Do you have a story that illustrates this?

CAMPBELL: Well, the old English tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a famous one. One day a green giant came riding on a great green horse into King Arthur’s dining hall. “I challenge anyone here,” he cried, “to take this great battle-ax that I carry and cut off my head, and then, one year from today, meet me at the Green Chapel, where I shall cut off his head.”

The only knight in the hall who had the courage to accept this incongruous invitation was Gawain. He arose from the table, the Green Knight got off his horse, handed Gawain the ax, stuck out his neck, and Gawain with a single stroke chopped off his head. The Green Knight stood up, picked up his head, took back the ax, climbed onto his horse, and as he rode away called back to the astonished Gawain, “I’ll see you in a year.”

That year everybody was very kind to Gawain. A fortnight or so before the term of the adventure, he rode off to search for the Green Chapel and keep faith with the giant Green Knight. As the date approached, with about three days to go, Gawain found himself before a hunter’s cabin, where he asked the way to the Green Chapel. The hunter, a pleasant, genial fellow, met him at the door and replied, “Well, the Chapel is just down the way, a few hundred yards. Why not spend your next three days here with us? We’d love to have you. And when your time comes, your green friend is just down the way.”

So Gawain says okay. And the hunter that evening says to him, “Now, early tomorrow I’m going off hunting, but I’ll be back in the evening, when we shall exchange our winnings of the day. I’ll give you everything I get on the hunt, and you give me whatever will have come to you.” They laugh, and that was fine with Gawain. So they all retire to bed.

In the morning, early, the hunter rides off while Gawain is still asleep. Presently, in comes the hunter’s extraordinarily beautiful wife, who tickles Gawain under the chin, and wakes him, and passionately invites him to a morning of love. Well, he is a knight of King Arthur’s court, and to betray his host is the last thing such a knight can stoop to, so Gawain sternly resists. However, she is insistent and makes more and more of an issue of this thing, until finally she says to him, “Well then, let me give you just one kiss!” So she gives him one large smack. And that was that.

That evening, the hunter arrives with a great haul of all kinds of small game, throws it on the floor, and Gawain gives him one large kiss. They laugh, and that, too, was that.

The second morning, the wife again comes into the room, more passionate than ever, and the fruit of that encounter is two kisses. The hunter in the evening returns with about half as much game as before and receives two kisses, and again they laugh.

On the third morning, the wife is glorious, and Gawain, a young man about to meet his death, has all he can do to keep his head and retain his knightly honor, with this last gift before him of the luxury of life. This time, he accepts three kisses. And when she has delivered these, she begs him, as a token of her love, to accept her garter. “It is charmed,” she says, “and will protect you against every danger.” So Gawain accepts the garter. And when the hunter returns with just one silly, smelly fox, which he tosses onto the floor, he receives in exchange three kisses from Gawain—but no garter.

Do we not see what the tests are of this young knight Gawain? They are the same as the first two of Buddha. One is of desire, lust. The other is of the fear of death. Gawain had proved courage enough in just keeping his faith with this adventure. However, the garter was just one temptation too many.

So when Gawain is approaching the Green Chapel, he hears the Green Knight there, whetting the great ax—whiff, whiff, whiff, whiff. Gawain arrives, and the giant simply says to him, “Stretch your neck out here on this block.” Gawain does so, and the Green Knight lifts the ax, but then pauses. “No, stretch it out a little more,” he says. Gawain does so, and again the giant elevates the great ax. “A little more,” he says once again. Gawain does the best he can and then whiffff—only giving Gawain’s neck one little scratch. Then the Green Knight, who is in fact the hunter himself transfigured, explains, “That’s for the garter.”

This, they say, is the origin legend of the order of the Knights of the Garter.

MOYERS: And the moral of the story?

CAMPBELL: The moral, I suppose, would be that the first requirements for a heroic career are the knightly virtues of loyalty, temperance, and courage. The loyalty in this case is of two degrees or commitments: first, to the chosen adventure, but then, also, to the ideals of the order of knighthood. Now, this second commitment seems to put Gawain’s way in opposition to the way of the Buddha, who when ordered by the Lord of Duty to perform the social duties proper to his caste, simply ignored the command, and that night achieved illumination as well as release from rebirth. Gawain is a European and, like Odysseus, who remained true to the earth and returned from the Island of the Sun to his marriage with Penelope, he has accepted, as the commitment of his life, not release from but loyalty to the values of life in this world. And yet, as we have just seen, whether following the middle way of the Buddha or the middle way of Gawain, the passage to fulfillment lies between the perils of desire and fear.

A third position, closer than Gawain’s to that of the Buddha, yet loyal still to the values of life on this earth, is that of Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra. In a kind of parable, Nietzsche describes what he calls the three transformations of the spirit. The first is that of the camel, of childhood and youth. The camel gets down on his knees and says, “Put a load on me.” This is the season for obedience, receiving instruction and the information your society requires of you in order to live a responsible life.

But when the camel is well loaded, it struggles to its feet and runs out into the desert, where it is transformed into a lion—the heavier the load that had been carried, the stronger the lion will be. Now, the task of the lion is to kill a dragon, and the name of the dragon is “Thou shalt.” On every scale of this scaly beast, a “thou shalt” is imprinted: some from four thousand years ago; others from this morning’s headlines. Whereas the camel, the child, had to submit to the “thou shalts,” the lion, the youth, is to throw them off and come to his own realization.

And so, when the dragon is thoroughly dead, with all its “thou shalts” overcome, the lion is transformed into a child moving out of its own nature, like a wheel impelled from its own hub. No more rules to obey. No more rules derived from the historical needs and tasks of the local society, but the pure impulse to living of a life in flower.

MOYERS: So we return to Eden?

CAMPBELL: To Eden before the Fall.

MOYERS: What are the “thou shalts” of a child that he needs to shed?

CAMPBELL: Every one that inhibits his self-fulfillment. For the camel, the “thou shalt” is a must, a civilizing force. It converts the human animal into a civilized human being. But the period of youth is the period of self-discovery and transformation into a lion. The rules are now to be used at will for life, not submitted to as compelling “thou shalts.”

Something of this kind has to be recognized and dealt with by any serious student of art. If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them. That is the time for the lion-deed. You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted. You don’t behave as the person behaves who has never mastered an art.

MOYERS: You say the time comes. How does a child know when his time has come? In ancient societies, the boy, for example, went through a ritual which told him the time had come. He knew that he was no longer a child and that he had to put off the influences of others and stand on his own. We don’t have such a clear moment or an obvious ritual in our society that says to my son, “You are a man.” Where is the passage today?

CAMPBELL: I don’t have the answer. I figure you must leave it up to the boy to know when he has got his power. A baby bird knows when it can fly. We have a couple of birds’ nests right near where we have breakfast in the morning, and we have seen several little families launched. These little things don’t make a mistake. They stay on the branch until they know how to fly, and then they fly. I think somehow, inside, a person knows this.

I can give you examples from what I know of students in art studios. There comes a moment when they have learned what the artist can teach them. They have assimilated the craft, and they are ready for their own flight. Some of the artists allow their students to do that. They expect the student to fly off. Others want to establish a school, and the student finds he has got to be nasty to the teacher, or to say bad things about him, in order to get his own flight. But that is the teacher’s own fault. He ought to have known it was time for the student to fly. The students I know, the ones who are really valid as students, know when it is time to push off.

MOYERS: There is an old prayer that says, “Lord, teach us when to let go.” All of us have to know that, don’t we?

CAMPBELL: That’s the big problem of the parent. Being a parent is one of the most demanding careers I know. When I think what my father and mother gave up of themselves to launch their family—well, I really appreciate that.

My father was a businessman, and, of course, he would have been very happy to have his son go into business with him and take it on. In fact, I did go into business with Dad for a couple of months, and then I thought, “Geez, I can’t do this.” And he let me go. There is that testing time in your life when you have got to test yourself out to your own flight.

MOYERS: Myths used to help us know when to let go.

CAMPBELL: Myths formulate things for you. They say, for example, that you have to become an adult at a particular age. The age might be a good average age for that to happen—but actually, in the individual life, it differs greatly. Some people are late bloomers and come to particular stages at a relatively late age. You have to have a feeling for where you are. You’ve got only one life to live, and you don’t have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it.

MOYERS: What about happiness? If I’m a young person and I want to be happy, what do myths tell me about happiness?

CAMPBELL: The way to find out about your happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you really are happy—not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self-analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what I call “following your bliss.”

MOYERS: But how does mythology tell you about what makes you happy?

CAMPBELL: It won’t tell you what makes you happy, but it will tell you what happens when you begin to follow your happiness, what the obstacles are that you’re going to run into.

For example, there’s a motif in American Indian stories that I call “the refusal of suitors.” There’s a young girl, beautiful, charming, and the young men invite her to marriage. “No, no, no,” she says, “there’s nobody around good enough for me.” So a serpent comes, or, if it’s a boy who won’t have anything to do with girls, the serpent queen of a great lake might come. As soon as you have refused the suitors, you have elevated yourself out of the local field and put yourself in the field of higher power, higher danger. The question is, are you going to be able to handle it?

Another American Indian motif involves a mother and two little boys. The mother says, “You can play around the houses, but don’t go north.” So they go north. There’s the adventurer.

MOYERS: And the point?

CAMPBELL: With the refusal of suitors, of the passing over a boundary, the adventure begins. You get into a field that’s unprotected, novel. You can’t have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.

Now, there’s an Iroquois story that illustrates the motif of the rejection of suitors. A girl lived with her mother in a wigwam on the edge of a village. She was a very beautiful girl but extremely proud and would not accept any of the boys. The mother was terribly annoyed with her.

One day they’re out collecting wood quite a long way from the village and, while they are out, an ominous darkness comes down over them. Now, this wasn’t the dark of night descending. When you have a darkness of this kind, there’s a magician at work somewhere behind it. So the mother says, “Let’s gather some bark and make a little wigwam for ourselves and collect wood for a fire, and we’ll just spend the night here.”

So they do exactly that and prepare a little supper, and the mother falls asleep. Suddenly the girl looks up, and there is a magnificent young man standing there before her with a wampum sash, glorious black feathers—a very handsome fellow. He says, “I’ve come to marry you, and I’ll await your reply.”

And she says, “I have to consult with my mother.”

She does so, the mother accepts the young man, and he gives the mother the wampum belt to prove he’s serious about the proposal. Then he says to the girl, “Tonight I would like you to come to my camp.” And so she leaves with him. Mere human beings weren’t good enough for this young lady, and so now she has something really special.

MOYERS: If she hadn’t said no to the first suitors who came through the routine social convention—

CAMPBELL: —she wouldn’t be having this adventure. Now the adventure is strange and marvelous. She accompanies the man to his village, and they enter his lodge. They spend two nights and days together, and on the third day he says to her, “I’m going off today to hunt.” So he leaves. But after he has closed the flap of the entrance, she hears a strange sound outside. She spends the day in the hut alone and, when evening comes, she hears the strange sound again. The entrance flap is flung open, and in slides a prodigious serpent with tongue darting. He puts his head on her lap and says to her, “Now search my head for lice.” She finds all sorts of horrible things there, and when she has killed them all, he withdraws his head, slides out of the lodge, and in a moment, after the door flap has closed, it opens again, and in comes her same beautiful young man. “Were you afraid of me when I came in that way just now?” he asks.

“No,” she replies, “I wasn’t afraid at all.”

So the next day he goes off to hunt again, and presently she steps out of the lodge to gather firewood. The first thing she sees is an enormous serpent basking on the rocks—and then another, and another. She begins to feel very strange, homesick and discouraged, and returns to the lodge.

That evening, the serpent again comes sliding in, again departs and returns as a man. The third day when he has gone, the young woman decides she’s going to try to get out of this place. She leaves the lodge and is in the woods alone, standing, thinking, when she hears a voice. She turns, and there’s a little old man, who says, “Darling, you are in trouble. The man you’ve married is one of seven brothers. They are all great magicians and, like many people of this kind, their hearts are not in their bodies. Go back into the lodge, and in a bag that is hidden under the bed of the one to whom you are married, you will find a collection of seven hearts.” This is a standard worldwide shamanic motif. The heart is not in the body, so the magician can’t be killed. You have to find and destroy the heart.

She returns to the lodge, finds the bag full of hearts, and is running out with it when a voice calls to her, “Stop, stop.” This is the voice, of course, of the magician. But she continues to run. And the voice calls after, “You may think you can get away from me, but you never will.”

Just at that point, she is beginning to faint, when she hears again the voice of the little old man. “I’ll help you,” it says and, to her surprise, he’s pulling her out of the water. She hadn’t known that she was in water. That is to say, that with her marriage she had moved out of the rational, conscious sphere into the field of compulsions of the unconscious. That’s always what’s represented in such adventures under water. The character has slipped out of the realm of controlled action into that of transpersonal compulsions and events. Now, maybe these can be handled, maybe they can’t.

What happens next in this story is that when the old man has pulled her out of the water, she finds herself in the midst of a company of old men standing along the shore, all looking exactly like her rescuer. They are the Thunderers, powers of the upper air. That is, she is still in the transcendent realm into which she brought herself by her refusal of suitors; only now, having torn herself away from the negative aspect of the powers, she has come into possession of the positive.

There is a lot more to this Iroquois tale, of how this young woman, now in the service of the higher powers, enabled them to destroy the negative powers of the abyss, and how, after that, she was conducted back, through a rainstorm, to the lodge of her mother.

MOYERS: Would you tell this to your students as an illustration of how, if they follow their bliss, if they take chances with their lives, if they do what they want to, the adventure is its own reward?

CAMPBELL: The adventure is its own reward—but it’s necessarily dangerous, having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control. We are following our own way, not our daddy’s or our mother’s way. So we are beyond protection in a field of higher powers than we know. One has to have some sense of what the conflict possibilities will be in this field, and here a few good archetypal stories like this may help us to know what to expect. If we have been impudent and altogether ineligible for the role into which we have cast ourselves, it is going to be a demon marriage and a real mess. However, even here there may be heard a rescuing voice, to convert the adventure into a glory beyond anything ever imagined.

MOYERS: It’s easier to stay home, stay in the womb, not take the journey.

CAMPBELL: Yes, but then life can dry up because you’re not off on your own adventure. On the other hand, I have had an opposite, and to me quite surprising, experience in meeting and coming to know someone whose whole youth was controlled and directed by others, from first to last. My friend is a Tibetan who as a child was recognized as being the reincarnation of an abbot who had been reincarnating since about the seventeenth century. He was taken into a monastery at the age of about four and, from that moment, never was asked what he would like to do, but in all things followed to the letter the rules and instruction of his masters. His entire life was planned for him according to the ritual requirements of Tibetan Buddhist monastery life. Every stage in his spiritual development was celebrated with a ceremony. His personal life was translated into an archetypal journey so that, although on the surface he would seem to be enjoying no personal existence whatsoever, he was actually living on a very deep spiritual level an archetypal life like that of a divinity.

In 1959, this life ended. The Chinese Communist military station in Lhasa bombed the summer palace of the Dalai Lama and a season of massacres began. There were monasteries around Lhasa of as many as six thousand monks—all were destroyed, and their monks and abbots were killed and tortured. Many fled, together with hundreds of other refugees, across the almost impassable Himalayas to India. It is a terrible story—largely untold.

Finally all these shattered people arrived in India, which can hardly take care of its own population, and among the refugees were the Dalai Lama himself and a number of the leading officers and abbots of the great monasteries now destroyed. And they all agreed, Buddhist Tibet is finished. My friend and the other young monks who had managed to escape were advised, therefore, to regard their vows now as of the past, and to feel free to choose, either to continue somehow as monks, or to give up the monastic life and try to find a way to reshape their lives to the requirements and possibilities of the modern secular man.

My friend chose the latter way, not realizing, of course, what this would mean in the way of frustration, poverty, and suffering. He has had a really difficult time, but he has survived it with the will and composure of a saint. Nothing fazes him. I’ve known and worked with him now for over a decade, and in all this time I haven’t heard one word, either of recrimination against the Chinese or of complaint about the treatment he has received here in the West. Nor from the Dalai Lama himself will you ever hear a word of resentment or condemnation. These men and all their friends have been the victims of a terrific upheaval, of terrific violence, and yet they have no hatred. I have learned what religion is from these men. Here is true religion, alive—today.

MOYERS: Love thine enemies.

CAMPBELL: Love thine enemies because they are the instruments of your destiny.

MOYERS: What do myths tell us about a God who lets two sons in one family die in a relatively short period of time, and who continues to visit on that family one ordeal after another? I remember the story of the young Buddha, who saw the decrepit old man and said, “Shame on birth because to everyone who is born, old age will come.” What does mythology say about suffering?

CAMPBELL: Since you bring up the Buddha, let’s talk about that example. The story of the Buddha’s childhood is that he was born as a prince and that, at the time of his birth, a prophet told his father that the infant would grow up to be either a world ruler or a world teacher. The good king was interested in his own profession, and the last thing he wanted was that his son should become a teacher of any kind. So he arranged to have the child brought up in an especially beautiful palace where he should experience nothing the least bit ugly or unpleasant that might turn his mind to serious thoughts. Beautiful young women played music and took care of the child. And there were beautiful gardens, lotus ponds, and all.

But then one day the young prince said to his chariot driver, his closest friend, “I’d like to go out and see what life is like in the town.” His father, on hearing this, tried to make everything nice so that his son, the young prince, should see nothing of the pain and misery of life in this world. The gods, however, saw to it that the father’s program for his son should be frustrated.

So, as the royal chariot was rolling along through the town, which had been swept clean, with everything ugly kept out of sight, one of the gods assumed the form of a decrepit old man and was standing there, within view. “What’s that?” the young prince asked his charioteer, and the reply he received was, “That’s an old man. That’s age.”

“Are all men then to grow old?” asked the prince.

“Ah, yes,” the charioteer replied.

“Then shame on life,” said the traumatized young prince, and he begged, sick at heart, to be driven home.

On a second trip, he saw a sick man, thin and weak and tottering, and again, on learning the meaning of this sight, his heart failed him, and the chariot returned to the palace.

On the third trip, the prince saw a corpse followed by mourners. “That,” said the charioteer, “is death.”

“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 darkness 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.