VI

THE GIFT OF
THE GODDESS

MOYERS: The Lord’s Prayer begins, “Our Father which art in Heaven …” Could it have begun “Our Mother”?

CAMPBELL: This is a symbolic image. All of the references of religious and mythological images are to planes of consciousness, or fields of experience that are potential in human spirit. And these images evoke attitudes and experiences that are appropriate to a meditation on the mystery of the source of your own being.

There have been systems of religion where the mother is the prime parent, the source. The mother is really a more immediate parent than the father because one is born from the mother, and the first experience of any infant is the mother. I have frequently thought that mythology is a sublimation of the mother image. We talk of Mother Earth. And in Egypt you have the Mother Heavens, the Goddess Nut, who is represented as the whole heavenly sphere.

MOYERS: I was seized in Egypt upon first seeing the figure of Nut in the ceiling of one of those temples.

CAMPBELL: Yes, I know the temple.

MOYERS: It’s overwhelming in both its ability to evoke awe and in its sensual character.

CAMPBELL: Yes. The idea of the Goddess is related to the fact that you’re born from your mother, and your father may be unknown to you, or the father may have died. Frequently, in the epics, when the hero is born, his father has died, or his father is in some other place, and then the hero has to go in quest of his father.

In the story of the incarnation of Jesus, the father of Jesus was the father in heaven, at least in terms of the symbology. When Jesus goes to the cross, he is on the way to the father, leaving the mother behind. And the cross, which is symbolic of the earth, is the mother symbol. So on the cross, Jesus leaves his body on the mother, from whom he has acquired his body, and he goes to the father, who is the ultimate transcendent mystery source.

MOYERS: What impact has this father quest had on us down through the centuries?

CAMPBELL: It’s a major theme in myth. There’s a little motif that occurs in many narratives related to a hero’s life, where the boy says, “Mother, who is my father?” She will say, “Well, your father is in such and such a place,” and then he goes on the father quest.

In the Odyssey, Odysseus’ son Telemachus is a tiny babe when Odysseus goes off to the Trojan War. The war lasts for ten years, and then, on his journey home, Odysseus is lost for ten more years in the mysterious world of the mythological Mediterranean. Athena comes to Telemachus, who is now twenty years old, and says, “Go find your father.” He doesn’t know where his father is. He goes to Nestor and asks, “Where do you think my father would be?” And Nestor says, “Well, go ask Proteus.” He’s on the father quest.

MOYERS: In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker says to his companions, “I wish I had known my father.” There’s something powerful in the image of the father quest. But why no mother quest?

CAMPBELL: Well, the mother’s right there. You’re born from your mother, and she’s the one who nurses you and instructs you and brings you up to the age when you must find your father.

Now, the finding of the father has to do with finding your own character and destiny. There’s a notion that the character is inherited from the father, and the body and very often the mind from the mother. But it’s your character that is the mystery, and your character is your destiny. So it is the discovery of your destiny that is symbolized by the father quest.

MOYERS: So when you find your father, you find yourself?

CAMPBELL: We have the word in English, “at-one-ment” with the father. You remember the story of Jesus lost in Jerusalem when he’s a little boy about twelve years old. His parents hunt for him, and when they find him in the temple, in conversation with the doctors of the law, they ask, “Why did you abandon us this way? Why did you give us this fear and anxiety?” And he says, “Didn’t you know I had to be about my father’s business?” He’s twelve years old—that’s the age of the adolescent initiations, finding who you are.

MOYERS: But what happened along the way to this reverence that in primitive societies was directed toward the Goddess figure, the Great Goddess, the mother earth—what happened to that?

CAMPBELL: Well, that was associated primarily with agriculture and the agricultural societies. It has to do with earth. The human woman gives birth just as the earth gives birth to the plants. She gives nourishment, as the plants do. So woman magic and earth magic are the same. They are related. And the personification of the energy that gives birth to forms and nourishes forms is properly female. It is in the agricultural world of ancient Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Nile, and in the earlier planting-culture systems that the Goddess is the dominant mythic form.

We have found hundreds of early European Neolithic figurines of the Goddess, but hardly anything there of the male figure at all. The bull and certain other animals, such as the boar and the goat, may appear as symbolic of the male power, but the Goddess was the only visualized divinity at that time.

And when you have a Goddess as the creator, it’s her own body that is the universe. She is identical with the universe. That’s the sense of that Goddess Nut figure that you saw in the Egyptian temple. She is the whole sphere of the life-enclosing heavens.

MOYERS: There is one scene of the Goddess swallowing the sun. Remember?

CAMPBELL: The idea is that she swallows the sun in the west and gives birth to the sun in the east, and it passes through her body at night.

MOYERS: So it would be natural for people trying to explain the wonders of the universe to look to the female figure as the explanation of what they see in their own lives.

CAMPBELL: Not only that, but when you move to a philosophical point of view, as in the Goddess religions of India—where the Goddess symbology is dominant to this day—the female represents maya. The female represents what in Kantian terminology we call the forms of sensibility. She is time and space itself, and the mystery beyond her is beyond all pairs of opposites. So it isn’t male and it isn’t female. It neither is nor is not. But everything is within her, so that the gods are her children. Everything you can think of, everything you can see, is a production of the Goddess.

I once saw a marvelous scientific movie about protoplasm. It was a revelation to me. It is in movement all the time, flowing. Sometimes it seems to be flowing this way and that, and then it shapes things. It has a potentiality for bringing things into shape. I saw this movie in northern California, and as I drove down the coast to Big Sur, all the way, all I could see was protoplasm in the form of grass being eaten by protoplasm in the form of cows; protoplasm in the form of birds diving for protoplasm in the form of fish. You just got this wonderful sense of the abyss from which all has come. But each form has its own intentions, its own possibilities, and that’s where meaning comes. Not in the protoplasm itself.

MOYERS: We are right back, then, to the Indians, who believe that the informing life and energy of all things is the earth. You quote those lines from the Upanishads: “Thou art the dark blue bird, and the green parrot with red eyes. Thou hast the lightning as thy child. Thou art the season and the seas. Having no beginning, thou dost abide with immanence, whereof all things are born.” That is this idea, isn’t it—that we and the earth are the same?

But wasn’t it inevitable that this idea would die under the weight of scientific discoveries? We know now that plants don’t grow out of the bodies of dead people, they grow according to the laws of seed, and soil, and sun. Didn’t Newton kill myth?

CAMPBELL: Oh, I think myth is coming back. There’s a young scientist today who’s using the term “morphogenetic field,” the field that produces forms. That’s who the Goddess is, the field that produces forms.

MOYERS: What’s the significance for us?

CAMPBELL: Well, it means to find what is the source of your own life, and what is the relationship of your body, your physical form, to this energy that animates it. The body without the energy isn’t alive, is it? So you distinguish in your own life that which is of the body and that which is of energy and consciousness.

In India, the most common ultimate symbol is of the phallus, or lingam, as they call it, of the generating god penetrating the vagina, or the yoni, as they call it, of the Goddess. In contemplating this symbol, you are contemplating the generating moment itself of all life. The entire mystery of the generation of life is symbolically contemplated in that sign.

You see, the sexual mystery in India, and in most of the world, is a holy mystery. It is the mystery of the generation of life. The act of generating a child is a cosmic act and is to be understood as holy. And so the symbol that most immediately represents this mystery of the pouring of the energy of life into the field of time is the lingam and the yoni, the male and female powers in creative conjunction.

MOYERS: What would it have meant to us if somewhere along the way we had begun to pray to “Our Mother” instead of “Our Father”? What psychological difference would it have made?

CAMPBELL: It certainly has made a psychological difference in the character of our culture. For example, the basic birth of Western civilization occurred in the great river valleys—the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus, and later the Ganges. That was the world of the Goddess. The name of the river Ganges (Ganga) is the name of a goddess, for example.

And then there came the invasions. Now, these started seriously in the fourth millennium B.C. and became more and more devastating. They came in from the north and from the south and wiped out cities overnight. Just read the story in the Book of Genesis of the part played by Jacob’s tribe in the fall of the city of Shechem. Overnight, the city is wiped out by these herding people who have suddenly appeared. The Semite invaders were herders of goats and sheep, the Indo-Europeans of cattle. Both were formerly hunters, and so the cultures are essentially animal-oriented. When you have hunters, you have killers. And when you have herders, you have killers, because they’re always in movement, nomadic, coming into conflict with other people and conquering the areas into which they move. And these invasions bring in warrior gods, thunderbolt hurlers, like Zeus, or Yahweh.

MOYERS: The sword and death instead of the phallus and fertility?

CAMPBELL: That’s right, and they are equated.

MOYERS: There’s a story you tell about the overthrow of the mother goddess Tiamat.

CAMPBELL: I guess that could be taken as the key archetypal event here.

MOYERS: You called it a critical moment in history.

CAMPBELL: Yes. The Semitic people were invading the world of the Mother Goddess systems, and so the male-oriented mythologies became dominant, and the Mother Goddess becomes, well—sort of Grandmother Goddess, way, way back.

It was in the time of the rise of the city of Babylon. And each of these early cities had its own protective god or goddess. The characteristic of an imperialistic people is to try to have its own local god dubbed big boy of the whole universe, you see. No other divinity counts. And the way to bring this about is by annihilating the god or goddess who was there before. Well, the one that was here before the Babylonian god Marduk was the All-Mother Goddess. So the story begins with a great council of the male gods up in the sky, each god a star, and they have heard that the Grandma is coming, old Tiamat, the Abyss, the inexhaustible Source. She arrives in the form of a great fish or dragon—and what god will have the courage to go against Grandma and do her in? And the one who has the courage is, of course, the god of our present great city. He’s the big one.

So when Tiamat opens her mouth, the young god Marduk of Babylon sends winds into her throat and belly that blow her to pieces, and he then dismembers her and fashions the earth and heavens out of the parts of her body. This motif of dismembering a primordial being and turning its body into the universe appears in many mythologies in many forms. In India it comes up with the figure of Purusha, the reflection of whose body is the universe.

Now, the mother goddess in old mother-goddess mythologies was herself already the universe, so the great creative deed of Marduk was a supererogatory act. There was no need for him to cut her up and make the universe out of her, because she was already the universe. But the male-oriented myth takes over, and he becomes—apparently—the creator.

MOYERS: And the interest turned from the Goddess to her son, this young political upstart who—

CAMPBELL: Well, the interest turned to the interest specifically of the male governors of the city of Babylon.

MOYERS: So the matriarchal society began to give way to a—

CAMPBELL: Oh, by that time—1750 B.C. or so—it was finished.

MOYERS: There are women today who say that the spirit of the Goddess has been in exile for five thousand years, since the—

CAMPBELL: You can’t put it that far back, five thousand years. She was a very potent figure in Hellenistic times in the Mediterranean, and she came back with the Virgin in the Roman Catholic tradition. You don’t have a tradition with the Goddess celebrated any more beautifully and marvelously than in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century French cathedrals, every one of which is called Notre Dame.

MOYERS: Yes, but all of those motifs and themes were controlled by males—priests, bishops—who excluded women, so whatever the form might have meant to the believer, for the purpose of power the image was in the hands of the dominant male figure.

CAMPBELL: You can put an accent on it that way, but I think it’s a little too strong because there were the great female saints. Hildegarde of Bingen—she was a match for Innocent III. And Eleanor of Aquitaine—I don’t think there is anybody in the Middle Ages who has the stature to match hers. One now can look back and quarrel with the whole situation, but the situation of women was not that bad by any means.

MOYERS: No, but none of those saints would ever become pope.

CAMPBELL: Becoming pope, that’s not much of a job, really. That’s a business position. None of the popes could ever have become the mother of Christ. There are different roles to play. It was the male’s job to protect the women.

MOYERS: That’s where the paternalistic idea grew.

CAMPBELL: Women are booty, they are goods. With the fall of a city, every woman in the city would be raped.

MOYERS: There’s this ethical contradiction mentioned in your book, quoting Exodus: “Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife—except abroad. Then you should put all males to the sword, and the women you shall take as booty to yourself.” That’s right out of the Old Testament.

CAMPBELL: Deuteronomy. Those are fierce passages.

MOYERS: And what do they say to you about women?

CAMPBELL: They say more about Deuteronomy than about women. The Hebrews were absolutely ruthless with respect to their neighbors. But this passage is an extreme statement of something that is inherent in most sociologically oriented mythologies. That is to say, love and compassion are reserved for the in-group, and aggression and abuse are projected outward on others. Compassion is to be reserved for members of your own group. The out-group is to be treated in a way described there in Deuteronomy.

Now, today there is no out-group anymore on the planet. And the problem of a modern religion is to have such compassion work for the whole of humanity. But then what happens to the aggression? This is a problem that the world is going to, have to face—because aggression is a natural instinct just as much as, and more immediate than, compassion, and it is always going to be there. It’s a biological fact. Of course, in biblical times, when the Hebrews came in, they really wiped out the Goddess. The term for the Canaanite goddess that’s used in the Old Testament is “the Abomination.” Apparently, throughout the period represented in the Book of Kings, for example, there was a back and forth between the two cults. Many of the Hebrew kings were condemned in the Old Testament for having worshiped on the mountaintops. Those mountains were symbols of the Goddess. And there was a very strong accent against the Goddess in the Hebrew, which you do not find in the Indo-European mythologies. Here you have Zeus marrying the Goddess, and then the two play together. So it’s an extreme case that we have in the Bible, and our own Western subjugation of the female is a function of biblical thinking.

MOYERS: Because when you substitute the male for the female, you get a different psychology, a different cultural bias. And it’s permissible in your culture to do what your gods do, so you just—

CAMPBELL: That’s exactly it. I would see three situations here. First, the early one of the Goddess, when the male is hardly a significant divinity. Then the reverse, when the male takes over her role. And finally, then, the classical stage, where the two are in interaction—as they are also, for example, in India.

MOYERS: Where does that arise?

CAMPBELL: It comes from the attitude of the Indo-Europeans, who did not completely devaluate the female principle.

MOYERS: What about the virgin birth? Suddenly, the Goddess reappears in the form of the chaste and pure vessel chosen for God’s action.

CAMPBELL: In the history of Western religions, this is an extremely interesting development. In the Old Testament, you have a God who creates a world without a goddess. Then when you come to Proverbs, there she is, Sophia, the Goddess of Wisdom, who says, “When He created the world, I was there, and I was His greatest joy.” But in the Hebrew tradition the idea of a son of God is repulsive, it is not considered at all. The Messiah as the son of God is not actually God’s son. He is one who in his character and dignity is worthy to be likened to the son of God. I’m sure there’s no idea of a virgin birth in that tradition. The virgin birth comes into Christianity by way of the Greek tradition. When you read the four gospels, for example, the only one in which the virgin birth appears is the Gospel According to Luke, and Luke was a Greek.

MOYERS: And in the Greek tradition there were images, legends, myths of virgin births?

CAMPBELL: Oh, yes—Leda and the swan, Persephone and the serpent, and this one and that one and the other one. The virgin birth is represented throughout.

MOYERS: This was not a new idea, then, in Bethlehem. But what is the meaning of the virgin birth?

CAMPBELL: I think the best way to answer that is to talk about a system they have in India that describes stages of spiritual development. In India, there is a system of seven psychological centers up the spine. They represent psychological planes of concern and consciousness and action. The first is at the rectum, representing alimentation, the basic, life-sustaining function. The serpent well represents this compulsion—as a kind of traveling esophagus going along just eating, eating, eating. None of us would be here if we weren’t forever eating. What you eat is always something that just a moment before was alive. This is the sacramental mystery of food and eating, which doesn’t often come to our minds when we sit ourselves down to eat. If we say grace before meals, we thank this figure out of the Bible for our food. But in earlier mythologies, when people would sit down to eat, they would thank the animal they were about to consume for having given of itself as a willing sacrifice.

There’s a wonderful saying in one of the Upanishads: “Oh wonderful, oh wonderful, oh wonderful, I am food, I am food, I am food! I am an eater of food, I am an eater of food, I am an eater of food.” We don’t think that way today about ourselves. But holding on to yourself and not letting yourself become food is the primary life-denying negative act. You’re stopping the flow! And a yielding to the flow is the great mystery experience that goes with thanking an animal that is about to be eaten for having given of itself. You, too, will be given in time.

MOYERS: I’m nature, nature is me.

CAMPBELL: Yes. Now, the second psychological center is symbolized in the Indian order of spiritual development by the sex organs, which is to say the urge to procreation. A third center is at the level of the navel, and here is the center of the will to power, to mastery and achievement, or, in its negative aspect, to the conquering, mastering, smashing, and trashing of others. This is the third, or aggressive, function. And as we are given to recognize in the symbolism of the Indian psychological system, the first function, alimentation, is of an animal instinct; the second, procreation, is of an animal instinct; and the third, mastery and conquest, is also of an animal instinct—and these three centers are located symbolically in the pelvic basin.

The next, or fourth, center is at the level of the heart; and this is of the opening to compassion. Here you move out of the field of animal action into a field that is properly human and spiritual.

And for each of these four centers there is envisioned a symbolic form. At the base, for example, the first one, the symbol is the lingam and yoni, the male and female organs in conjunction. And at the heart center, there is again the lingam and yoni, that is to say, male and female organs in conjunction, but here they are represented in gold as symbolic of the virgin birth, that is to say, it is the birth of spiritual man out of the animal man.

MOYERS: And it happens—

CAMPBELL: It happens when you awaken at the level of the heart to compassion, com-passion, shared suffering: experienced participation in the suffering of another person. That’s the beginning of humanity. And the meditations of religion properly are on that level, the heart level.

MOYERS: You say that’s the beginning of humanity. But in these stories, that’s the moment when gods are born. The virgin birth—it’s a god who emerges.

CAMPBELL: And do you know who that god is? It’s you. All of these symbols in mythology refer to you. You can get stuck out there, and think it’s all out there. So you’re thinking about Jesus with all the sentiments relevant to how he suffered—out there. But that suffering is what ought to be going on in you. Have you been spiritually reborn? Have you died to your animal nature and come to life as a human incarnation of compassion?

MOYERS: Why is it significant that this is of a virgin?

CAMPBELL: The begetter is of the spirit. This is a spiritual birth. The virgin conceived of the word through the ear.

MOYERS: The word came like a shaft of light.

CAMPBELL: Yes. And the Buddha, with the same meaning, is said to have been born from his mother’s side from the level of the heart chakra.

MOYERS: Heart Chakra meaning …?

CAMPBELL: Oh, the heart chakra is the symbolic center associated with the heart. The chakra means “circle” or “sphere.”

MOYERS: So the Buddha comes out—

CAMPBELL: —the Buddha is born from his mother’s side. That’s a symbolic birth. He wasn’t physically born from his mother’s side, but symbolically.

MOYERS: But the Christ came the way you and I did.

CAMPBELL: Yes, but of a virgin. And then, according to Roman Catholic doctrine, her virginity was restored. So nothing happened physically, you might say. What is symbolically referred to is not Jesus’ physical birth but his spiritual significance. That’s what the virgin birth represents. Heroes and demigods are born that way as beings motivated by compassion and not mastery, sexuality, or self-preservation.

This is the sense of the second birth, when you begin to live out of the heart center. The lower three centers are not to be refuted but transcended, when they become subject to and servant to the heart.

MOYERS: If we go back into antiquity, do we find images of the Madonna as the mother of the savior child?

CAMPBELL: The antique model for the Madonna, actually, is Isis with Horus at her breast.

MOYERS: Isis?

CAMPBELL: It’s a complicated story. Indeed all of these get to be pretty complicated. But Isis and her husband Osiris were twins, born of the Goddess Nut. And their younger relatives were Seth and Nephthys, who were also twins born from Nut. One night, Osiris slept with Nephthys, thinking she was Isis—a kind of inattention to details, you might say. From that night’s event, Anubis was born, Osiris’ oldest son, but by the wrong wife. Seth, her husband, took this badly and planned to kill his older brother, Osiris. Secretly he took Osiris’ measurements and had a beautiful sarcophagus made that would exactly fit him. And then, one evening, when there was a lively party in progress among the gods, Seth came in with his sarcophagus and declared that anyone whom it perfectly fitted could have it as a gift for his tomb. Everyone at the party tried, and of course when Osiris got in, the sarcophagus fitted him perfectly. Immediately seventy-two accomplices came rushing out, and they clapped the lid on, strapped it together, and threw it into the Nile. So what we have here is the death of a god. And whenever you have the death of such a god as this, you may next expect a resurrection.

The death of Osiris was symbolically associated with the annual rising and flooding of the river Nile, by which the soil of Egypt was annually fertilized. It was as though the rotting of the body of Osiris fertilized and vitalized the land.

Osiris went floating down the Nile and was washed ashore on a beach in Syria. A beautiful tree with a wonderful aroma grew up and incorporated the sarcophagus in its trunk. The local king had just had a son born to him and happened at the time to be about to build a palace. And because the aroma of that tree was so wonderful, he had it cut down and brought in to become the central pillar in the main room of the palace.

Meanwhile the poor goddess Isis, whose husband had been thrown into the Nile, started off on a search for his body. This theme of the search for the God who is the spouse of the soul is a prime mythological theme of the period: of the Goddess who goes in quest of her lost spouse or lover and, through loyalty and a descent into the realm of death, becomes his redeemer.

Isis comes in time to the palace and there learns of the aromatic column in the royal palace. She suspects this may have something to do with Osiris, and she gets a job as nurse to the newborn child. Well, she lets the child nurse from her finger—after all, she’s a goddess, and there’s a limit to the degree of stooping to conquer. But she loves the little boy and decides to give him immortality by placing him in the fireplace to burn his mortal body away. As a goddess, she could prevent the fire from killing him, you understand. And every evening, while the child is in the fire, she transforms herself into a swallow and goes flying mournfully around the column in which her husband is enclosed.

One evening the child’s mother comes into the room while this little scene is in progress, sees her infant in the fireplace, lets out a scream, which breaks the spell, and the child has to be rescued from incineration. The swallow, meanwhile, has turned back into the gorgeous nurse and goddess, who explains the situation and says to the queen, “By the way, it’s my husband there in that column, and I’d be grateful if you would just let me take him home.” So the king, who has appeared on the scene, says, “Why, yes! Certainly.” He has the column removed, turns it over to Isis, and the beautiful sarcophagus containing Osiris is placed on a royal barge.

On the way back to the Nile Delta, Isis removes the lid of the coffin, lies upon her dead husband, and conceives. This is a motif that appears in the ancient mythologies all the time under many symbolic forms—out of death comes life. When the barge has landed, the Goddess gives birth in the papyrus swamp to her child, Horus; and it was the figure of this divine mother with her child conceived of God that became the model for the Madonna.

MOYERS: And the swallow became, did it not, the dove?

CAMPBELL: Well, the dove, the bird in flight, is a pretty nearly universal symbol of the spirit, as in Christianity, of the Holy Ghost—

MOYERS: —associated with the sacred mother?

CAMPBELL: With the mother as conceiving of the spirit, yes. But one more little detail here. The jealous younger brother, Seth, meanwhile, has usurped the throne of Osiris. However, properly to represent the throne, he should marry Isis. In Egyptian iconography, Isis represents the throne. The Pharaoh sits on the throne, which is Isis, as a child on its mother’s lap. And so, when you stand before the cathedral of Chartres, you will see over one of the portals of the western front an image of the Madonna as the throne upon which the child Jesus sits and blesses the world as its emperor. That is precisely the image that has come down to us from most ancient Egypt. The early fathers and the early artists took over these images intentionally.

MOYERS: The Christian fathers took the image of Isis?

CAMPBELL: Definitely. They say so themselves. Read the text where it is declared that “those forms which were merely mythological forms in the past are now actual and incarnate in our Savior.” The mythologies here referred to were of the dead and resurrected god: Attis, Adonis, Gilgamesh, Osiris, one after the other. The death and resurrection of the god is everywhere associated with the moon, which dies and is resurrected every month. It is for two nights, or three days dark, and we have Christ for two nights, or three days in the tomb.

No one knows what the actual date of the birth of Jesus might have been, but it has been put on what used to be the date of the winter solstice, December 25, when the nights begin to be shorter and the days longer. That is the moment of the rebirth of light. That was exactly the date of the birth of the Persian God of light, Mithra, Sol, the Sun.

MOYERS: What does this say to you?

CAMPBELL: It says to me that there’s an idea of death to the past and birth to the future in our lives and our thinking: death to the animal nature and birth to the spiritual. These symbols are talking about this one way or another.

MOYERS: So Isis is able to say, “I am she that is the natural mother of all things. Mistress and governess of all the elements. Chief of the powers divine, queen of all that are in hell, but principal of all them that dwell in heaven. Manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses.”

CAMPBELL: That is a very late statement of this whole theme. That comes in Apuleius’ Golden Ass, second century A.D. The Golden Ass is one of the first novels, by the way. Its leading character, its hero, has been by lust and magic converted into an ass, and he has to undergo an ordeal of painful and humiliating adventures until his redemption comes through the grace of the Goddess Isis. She appears with a rose in her hand (symbolic of divine love, not lust), and when as an ass he eats this rose, he is converted back into a man. But he is now more than a man, he is an illuminated man, a saint. He has experienced the second virgin birth, you see. So from mere animal-like carnality, one may pass through a spiritual death and become reborn. The second birth is of an exalted, spiritually informed incarnation.

And the Goddess is the one who brings this about. The second birth is through a spiritual mother. Notre Dame de Paris, Notre Dame de Chartres—our Mother Church. We are reborn spiritually by entering and leaving a church.

MOYERS: There’s a power there unique to the feminine principle.

CAMPBELL: In this novel it has been put that way, but it’s not necessarily unique to her. You can have rebirth through the male also. But using this system of symbols, the woman becomes the regenerator.

MOYERS: So when the Council of Ephesus met in the year 431 after the death of Christ, and proclaimed Mary to be the Mother of God, it wasn’t the first time?

CAMPBELL: No, in fact that argument had been going on in the Church for some time. But the place where this decision was made, at Ephesus, happened at that time to be the greatest temple city in the Roman Empire of the Goddess Artemis, or Diana. And there is a story that when the council was in session, arguing this point, the people of Ephesus formed picket lines and shouted in praise of Mary, “The Goddess, the Goddess, of course she’s the Goddess.”

Well, what you have then in the Catholic tradition is a coming together of the patriarchal, monotheistic Hebrew idea of the Messiah as one who is to unite the spiritual and temporal powers, and the Hellenistic, classical idea of the Savior as the dead and resurrected son of the Great Goddess by a virgin birth. There were plenty of such saviors reborn.

In the Near East, the god who descended into the field of time was originally a goddess. Jesus took over what is really the Goddess’ role in coming down in compassion. But when the Virgin acquiesces in being the vessel of the incarnation, she has herself already affected the redemption. It has become more and more apparent that the Virgin is equivalent in her suffering to the suffering of her son. In the Catholic Church now I think she is called the “co-savior.”

MOYERS: What does all of this say about the reunion of the male and female? For a long while in primitive societies, the female is the dominant mythological image. Then along comes this masculine, aggressive, warlike image, and soon we’re back to the female playing a role in creation and recreation. Does it say something about the basic yearning of men and women for each other?

CAMPBELL: Yes, but I think of it rather in historical terms. It is a very interesting thing to see that this Mother Goddess was the queen right across to the Indus Valley in India. From the Aegean to the Indus, she is the dominant figure. Then you have the Indo-Europeans coming down from the north, into Persia, India, Greece, Italy, and you have a male-oriented mythology coming in, all along the line. In India it’s the Vedas, in Greece it’s the Homeric tradition, and then about five hundred years later, the Goddess begins coming back. There is actually an Upanishad from about the seventh century B.c.—which is just about the time she is coming back to force in the Aegean as well—where the Vedic gods are together, and they see a strange sort of amorphous thing down the way, a kind of smoky fog, and they ask, “What’s that?” None of them knows what it could be. So one of them suggests, “I’ll go find out what that is.” And he goes over to this smoky thing and says, “I’m Agni, the Lord of Fire; I can burn anything. Who are you?” And out of the fog there comes flying a piece of straw, which falls on the ground, and a voice says, “Let’s see you burn that.” Agni finds that he can’t ignite it. So he goes back to the other gods and says, “This surely is strange!” “Well, then,” says the Lord of Wind, “let me try.” So over he goes, and the same sort of thing takes place. “I’m Vayu, Lord of the Wind, I can blow anything around.” Again a straw is thrown. “Let’s see you blow that.” And he can’t. So he, too, returns. Then Indra, the greatest of the Vedic gods, approaches, but as he draws near, the apparition vanishes, and where it had been, a woman appears, a beautiful, mysterious woman, who instructs the gods, revealing to them the mystery of the ground of their own being. “That is the ultimate mystery of all being,” she tells them, “from which you boys yourselves have received your powers. And It can turn your powers off or on, as It wills.” The Indian name for that Being of all beings is brahman, which is a neuter noun, neither male nor female. And the Indian name for the woman is Maya-Shakti-Devi, “Goddess Giver of Life and Mother of Forms.” And there in that Upanishad she appears as the teacher of the Vedic gods themselves concerning the ultimate ground and source of their own powers and being.

MOYERS: It’s the female wisdom.

CAMPBELL: It’s the female as the giver of forms. She is the one who gave life to the forms and she knows where they came from. It is from that which is beyond male and female. It is from that which is beyond being and nonbeing. It both is and is not. It neither is nor is not. It is beyond all categories of thought and the mind.

MOYERS: There is that wonderful saying in the New Testament, “In Jesus there is no male or female.” In the ultimate sense of things, there is neither.

CAMPBELL: It would have to be. If Jesus represents the source of our being, we are all, as it were, thoughts in the mind of Jesus. He is the word that has become flesh in us, too.

MOYERS: You and I possess characteristics that are both male and female?

CAMPBELL: The body does. I don’t know anything about the actual dating of all this, but sometime in the fetal period it becomes apparent that this child is going to be male, and this one is going to be female. Meanwhile, it’s a body with the potentialities for either inflection.

MOYERS: So through life we are honoring or suppressing one or the other.

CAMPBELL: And in that yin/yang figure from China, in the dark fish, or whatever you want to call it, there is the light spot. And in the light one, there’s a dark spot. That’s how they can relate. You couldn’t relate at all to something in which you did not somehow participate. That’s why the idea of God as the Absolute Other is a ridiculous idea. There could be no relationship to the Absolute Other.

MOYERS: In this spiritual transformation that you’re talking about, won’t the changes depend on those feminine characteristics such as nurturing, creativity, and collaboration instead of competition? Isn’t this at the heart of the feminine principle we’re discussing?

CAMPBELL: Well, the mother loves all her children—the stupid ones, the bright ones, the naughty ones, the good ones. It doesn’t matter what their particular character is. So the feminine represents, in a way, the inclusive love for progeny. The father is more disciplinarian. He’s associated much more with the social order and the social character. This is actually the way it works in societies. The mother gives birth to his nature, and the father gives birth to his social character, you might say, how he is to function.

So moving back toward nature will certainly bring forth the mother principle again. How it will relate to the patriarchal principle I do not know, because the organization of the planet is going to be an enormous operation, and that’s the male function, so that you can’t predict what the new thing is going to be. But certainly nature is coming back.

MOYERS: So when we say, “Save the earth,” we’re talking about saving ourselves.

CAMPBELL: Yes. All this hope for something happening in society has to wait for something in the human psyche, a whole new way of experiencing a society. And the crucial question here, as I see it, is simply: With what society, what social group, do you identify yourself? Is it going to be with all the people of the planet, or is it going to be with your own particular in-group? This is the question, essentially, that was in the minds of the founders of our nation when the people of the thirteen states began thinking of themselves as of one nation, yet without losing consideration for the special interests of each of the several states. Why can’t something of that kind take place in the world right now?

MOYERS: A question arises in discussing all this—the male-female principle, the virgin birth, the spiritual power that gives us the second birth. The wise people of all times have said that we can live the good life if we learn to live spiritually. But how does one learn to live spiritually if one is of the flesh? Paul said, “The desires of the flesh are against the spirit and the desires of the spirit are against the flesh.” How do we learn to live spiritually?

CAMPBELL: In ancient times, that was the business of the teacher. He was to give you the clues to a spiritual life. That is what the priest was for. Also, that was what ritual was for. A ritual can be defined as an enactment of a myth. By participating in a ritual, you are actually experiencing a mythological life. And it’s out of that participation that one can learn to live spiritually.

MOYERS: The stories of mythology actually point the way to the spiritual life?

CAMPBELL: Yes, you’ve got to have a clue. You’ve got to have a road map of some kind, and these are all around us. But they are not all the same. Some speak only of the interests of this in-group or of that, this tribal god or that. Others, and especially those that are given as revelations of the Great Goddess, mother of the universe and of us all, teach compassion for all living beings. There also you come to appreciate the real sanctity of the earth itself, because it is the body of the Goddess. When Yahweh creates, he creates man of the earth and breathes life into the formed body. He’s not himself there present in that form. But the Goddess is within as well as without. Your body is of her body. There is in these mythologies a recognition of that kind of universal identity.

MOYERS: That’s why I’m not so sure the future of the race and the salvation of the journey is in space. I think it might be right here on earth, in the body, in the womb of our being.

CAMPBELL: Well, it certainly is. When you go out into space, what you’re carrying is your body, and if that hasn’t been transformed, space won’t transform you. But thinking about space may help you to realize something. There’s a two-page spread in a world atlas which shows our galaxy within many galaxies, and within our galaxy the solar system. And here you get a sense of the magnitude of this space that we’re now finding out about. What those pages opened to me was the vision of a universe of unimaginable magnitude and inconceivable violence. Billions upon billions of roaring thermonuclear furnaces scattering from each other. Each thermonuclear furnace a star, and our sun among them. Many of them actually blowing themselves to pieces, littering the outermost reaches of space with dust and gas out of which new stars with circling planets are being born right now. And then from still more remote distances beyond all these there come murmurs, microwaves that are echoes of the greatest cataclysmic explosion of all, namely the big bang of creation, which, according to some reckonings, may have occurred some eighteen billion years ago.

That’s where we are, kiddo, and to realize that, you realize how really important you are, you know—one little microbit in that great magnitude. And then must come the experience that you and that are in some sense one, and you partake of all of that.

MOYERS: And it begins here.

CAMPBELL: It begins here.