VII

TALES OF LOVE
AND MARRIAGE

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

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

MOYERS: And who were they?

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

MOYERS: Were they the poets of their age?

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

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

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

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

MOYERS: What had it been before that?

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

MOYERS: Explain.

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

MOYERS: And Agape?

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

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

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

MOYERS: Agape is a religious impulse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MOYERS: That’s the credo?

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

MOYERS: And libido?

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

MOYERS: And the heart is—

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

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

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

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

MOYERS: Because it was heresy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MOYERS: And in choosing love, too?

CAMPBELL: In choosing love, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CAMPBELL: Yes.

MOYERS: Even now?

CAMPBELL: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MOYERS: So there were rules to determine the testing?

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

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

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

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

MOYERS: Which means?

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

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

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

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

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

MOYERS: The troubadours weren’t aiming, were they, to dissolve marriages or the world, nor was their aim carnal intercourse, lust, or even the quenching of the soul of God. You write, “Rather, they celebrated life directly in the experience of love as a refining, sublimating force, opening the heart to the sad bittersweet melody of being through love, one’s own anguish and one’s own joy.” They weren’t trying to destroy things, were they?

CAMPBELL: No, you see, that motive of power was not what was in them. It was the motive of personal experience and sublimation. It’s quite different. There was no direct attack on the Church. The idea was to sublimate life into a spiritual plane of experiences.

MOYERS: Love is right in front of me. Amor is the path directly before me, the eyes—

CAMPBELL: —the meeting of the eyes, that idea. “So through the eyes love attains the heart: / For the eyes are the scouts of the heart.”

MOYERS: What was it that the troubadours learned about the psyche? We’ve heard about the psyche—Eros loved Psyche—and we’re told in our day that you must understand your psyche. What did the troubadours discover about the human psyche?

CAMPBELL: What they discovered was a certain individual aspect of it that cannot be talked about in purely general terms. The individual experience, the individual commitment to experience, the individual believing in his experience and living it—that is the main point here.

MOYERS: So love is not love in general, it is love for that woman?

CAMPBELL: For that one woman. That’s right.

MOYERS: Why do you think we fall in love with one person and not another?

CAMPBELL: Well, I wouldn’t be one to say. It’s a very mysterious thing, that electric thing that happens, and then the agony that can follow. The troubadours celebrate the agony of the love, the sickness the doctors cannot cure, the wounds that can be healed only by the weapon that delivered the wound.

MOYERS: Meaning?

CAMPBELL: The wound is the wound of my passion and the agony of my love for this creature. The only one who can heal me is the one who delivered the blow. That’s a motif that appears in symbolic form in many medieval stories of the lance that delivers a wound. It is only when that lance can touch the wound again that the wound can be healed.

MOYERS: Wasn’t there something of this idea in the legend of the Holy Grail?

CAMPBELL: In the monastic version of the story, the Grail is associated with Christ’s passion. The Grail is the chalice of the Last Supper and the chalice that received Christ’s blood when he was taken from the cross.

MOYERS: What does the Grail represent then?

CAMPBELL: There’s a very interesting statement about the origin of the Grail. One early writer says that the Grail was brought from heaven by the neutral angels. You see, during the war in heaven between God and Satan, between good and evil, some angelic hosts sided with Satan and some with God. The Grail was brought down through the middle by the neutral angels. It represents that spiritual path that is between pairs of opposites, between fear and desire, between good and evil.

The theme of the Grail romance is that the land, the country, the whole territory of concern has been laid waste. It is called a wasteland. And what is the nature of the wasteland? It is a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you’re told, with no courage for your own life. That is the wasteland. And that is what T. S. Eliot meant in his poem The Waste Land.

In a wasteland the surface does not represent the actuality of what it is supposed to be representing, and people are living inauthentic lives. “I’ve never done a thing I wanted to in all my life. I’ve done as I was told.” You know?

MOYERS: And the Grail becomes?

CAMPBELL: The Grail becomes the—what can we call it?—that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives. The Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness.

The Grail King, for example, was a lovely young man, but he had not earned the position of Grail King. He rode forth from his castle with the war cry “Amor!” Well, that’s proper for youth, but it doesn’t belong to the guardianship of the Grail. And as he’s riding forth, a Muslim, a pagan knight, comes out of the woods. They both level their lances at each other, and they drive at each other. The lance of the Grail King kills the pagan, but the pagan’s lance castrates the Grail King.

What that means is that the Christian separation of matter and spirit, of the dynamism of life and the realm of the spirit, of natural grace and supernatural grace, has really castrated nature. And the European mind, the European life, has been, as it were, emasculated by this separation. The true spirituality, which would have come from the union of matter and spirit, has been killed. And then what did the pagan represent? He was a person from the suburbs of Eden. He was regarded as a nature man, and on the head of his lance was written the word “Grail.” That is to say, nature intends the Grail. Spiritual life is the bouquet, the perfume, the flowering and fulfillment of a human life, not a supernatural virtue imposed upon it.

And so the impulses of nature are what give authenticity to life, not the rules coming from a supernatural authority—that’s the sense of the Grail.

MOYERS: Is this what Thomas Mann meant when he talked about mankind being the noblest work because it joins nature and spirit?

CAMPBELL: Yes.

MOYERS: Nature and spirit are yearning for each other to meet in this experience. And the Grail that these romantic legends were searching for is the union once again of what has been divided, the peace that comes from joining.

CAMPBELL: The Grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that is lived in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse system, that carries itself between the pairs of opposites of good and evil, light and dark. One writer of the Grail legend starts his long epic with a short poem saying, “Every act has both good and evil results.” Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, toward the harmonious relationships that come from compassion with suffering, from understanding the other person. This is what the Grail is about. And this is what comes out in the romance.

In the Grail legend young Perceval has been brought up in the country by a mother who refused the courts and wanted her son to know nothing about the court rules. Perceval’s life is lived in terms of the dynamic of his own impulse system until he becomes more mature. Then he is offered a lovely young girl in marriage by her father, who has trained him to be a knight. And Perceval says, “No, I must earn a wife, not be given a wife.” And that’s the beginning of Europe.

MOYERS: The beginning of Europe?

CAMPBELL: Yes—the individual Europe, the Grail Europe.

Now, when Perceval comes to the Grail castle, he meets the Grail King, who is brought in on a litter, wounded, kept alive simply by the presence of the Grail. Perceval’s compassion moves him to ask, “What ails you, Uncle?” But he doesn’t ask the question because he has been taught by his instructor that a knight doesn’t ask unnecessary questions. So he obeys the rule, and the adventure fails.

And then it takes him five years of ordeals and embarrassments and all kinds of things to get back to that castle and ask the question that heals the king and heals society. The question is an expression, not of the rules of the society, but of compassion, the natural opening of the human heart to another human being. That’s the Grail.

MOYERS: And it is a kind of love that—

CAMPBELL: Well, it is spontaneous compassion, a suffering with.

MOYERS: What was it Jung said—that the soul cannot exist in peace until it finds its other, and the other is always a you? Is that what the romantic—

CAMPBELL: Yes, exactly, romance. That’s romance. That’s what myth is all about.

MOYERS: Not a sentimental kind of romance?

CAMPBELL: No, sentiment is an echo of violence. It’s not really a vital expression.

MOYERS: What do you think all of this says about romantic love? About our individual selves?

MOYERS: It says that we’re in two worlds. We’re in our own world, and we’re in the world that has been given us outside, and the problem is to achieve a harmonious relationship between the two. I come into this society, so I’ve got to live in terms of this society. It’s ridiculous not to live in terms of this society because, unless I do, I’m not living. But I mustn’t allow this society to dictate to me how I should live. One has to build up one’s own system that may violate the expectations of the society, and sometimes society doesn’t accept that. But the task of life is to live within the field provided by the society that is really supporting you.

A point comes up—for instance, a war, where the young men have to register for the draft. This involves an enormous decision. How far are you going to go in acceding to what the society is asking of you—to kill other people whom you don’t know? For what? For whom? All that kind of thing.

MOYERS: That’s what I meant a minute ago when I said society couldn’t exist if every heart were vagrant, every eye were wandering.

CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s certainly so. But there are some societies that shouldn’t exist, you know.

MOYERS: Sooner or later they—

CAMPBELL: —crack up.

MOYERS: The troubadours cracked up that old world.

CAMPBELL: I don’t think it was they, really, who cracked it up.

MOYERS: It was love.

CAMPBELL: It was—well, it was much the same thing. Luther was, in a way, a troubadour of Christ. He had his own idea of what it meant to be a priest. And that smashed up the medieval Church, really. It never recovered.

You know, it’s very interesting to think of the history of Christianity. During the first five centuries, there were lots of Christianities, lots of ways of being Christian. And then, in the period of Theodosius in the fourth century, the only religion allowed in the Roman Empire was the Christian religion, and the only form of Christianity allowed in the Roman Empire was the Christianity of Byzantium’s throne. The vandalism involved in the destruction of the pagan temples of antiquity is hardly matched in world history.

MOYERS: Destroyed by the organized Church?

CAMPBELL: By the organized Church. And why couldn’t Christians live with another religion? What was the matter with them?

MOYERS: What do you think?

CAMPBELL: It’s power, it’s power. I think the power impulse is the fundamental impulse in European history. And it got into our religious traditions.

One of the very interesting things about the Grail legends is that they occur about five hundred years after Christianity has been imposed upon Europe. They represent a coming together of two traditions.

Around the end of the twelfth century, the Abbot Joachim of Floris wrote of the three ages of the spirit. After the Fall in the Garden, he said, God had to compensate for the disaster and reintroduce the spiritual principle into history. He chose a race to become the vehicle of this communication, and that is the age of the Father and of Israel. And then this race, having been prepared as a priestly race, competent to become the vessel of the Incarnation, produces the Son. Thus, the second age is of the Son and the Church, when not a single race but the whole of humanity is to receive the message of the spiritual will of God.

The third age, which this philosopher in around 1260 said was now about to begin, is the age of the Holy Spirit, who speaks directly to the individual. Anyone who incarnates or brings into his life the message of the Word is equivalent to Jesus—that’s the sense of this third age. Just as Israel has been rendered archaic by the institution of the Church, so the Church is rendered archaic by the individual experience.

That began a whole movement of hermits going into the forests to receive the experience. The saint who is regarded as the first representative of this was St. Francis of Assisi, who represented the equivalent of Christ, and who was himself a manifestation in the physical world of the Holy Spirit.

Now, that is what lay behind the quest of the Grail. Galahad on his quest was equivalent to Christ. He was introduced to Arthur’s court in flaming red armor, on the Feast of Pentecost, which is the feast of the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the apostles in the form of fire. Each of us can be a Galahad, you know. That’s a Gnostic position with respect to the message of Christianity. The Gnostic documents, buried in the desert during the time of Theodosius, express this idea.

In the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas, for example, Jesus says, “He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am and I shall be he.” That is the idea in those romances of the Grail.

MOYERS: You’ve said that what happened in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was one of the most important mutations of human feeling and spiritual consciousness, that a new way of experiencing love came into expression.

CAMPBELL: Yes.

MOYERS: And it was in opposition to the ecclesiastical despotism over the heart that required people, particularly young girls, to marry whomever the Church or their parents wanted them to marry. What had this done to the passion of the heart?

CAMPBELL: Well, to say a word for the other first—one has to recognize that in domestic life there grows up a love relationship between the husband and wife even when they’re put together in an arranged marriage. In other words, in arranged marriages of this kind, there is a lot of love. There’s family love, a rich love life on that level. But you don’t get this other thing, of the seizure that comes in recognizing your soul’s counterpart in the other person. And that’s what the troubadours stood for, and that has become the ideal in our lives today.

But marriage is marriage, you know. Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn’t that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it’s off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you’re not married.

MOYERS: Does romance in marriage last?

CAMPBELL: In some marriages, it does. In others, it doesn’t. But the problem, you see, the big word in this troubadour tradition, is “loyalty.”

MOYERS: What do you mean by loyalty?

CAMPBELL: Not cheating, not defecting—through whatever trials or suffering, you remain true.

MOYERS: The Puritans called marriage “the little church within the Church.” In marriage, every day you love, and every day you forgive. It is an ongoing sacrament—love and forgiveness.

CAMPBELL: Well, the real word, I think, is “ordeal,” in its proper sense. That is the submission of the individual to something superior to itself. The real life of a marriage or of a true love affair is in the relationship, which is where you are, too. You understand what I mean?

MOYERS: No, I’m not clear on that.

CAMPBELL: Like the yin/yang symbol, you see. Here I am, and here she is, and here we are. Now when I have to make a sacrifice, I’m not sacrificing to her, I’m sacrificing to the relationship. Resentment against the other one is wrongly placed. Life is in the relationship, that’s where your life now is. That’s what a marriage is—whereas, in a love affair, you have two lives in a more or less successful relationship to each other for a certain length of time, as long as it seems agreeable.

MOYERS: In the sacred marriage, what God has joined together is one and cannot be sundered by man.

CAMPBELL: It was one to begin with, and the marriage restates that unity symbolically.

MOYERS: It was one to begin with?

CAMPBELL: Marriage is the symbolic recognition of our identity—two aspects of the same being.

MOYERS: You know the curious old legend of the blind prophet Tiresias?

CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s a grand story. Tiresias was walking through the forest one day when he saw two copulating serpents. And he placed his staff between them and was transformed into a woman, and lived as a woman for a number of years. Then again, Tiresias the woman was walking through the forest when she saw two copulating serpents and placed her staff between them and was turned back into a man.

Well, one fine day on Capitol Hill, the Hill of Zeus—

MOYERS: Mount Olympus?

CAMPBELL: —Mount Olympus, yes—Zeus and his Wife were arguing as to who enjoyed sexual intercourse the more, the male or the female. And of course nobody there could decide because they were only on one side of the net, you might say. Then someone said, “Let’s ask Tiresias.”

So they go to Tiresias, and they ask him the question, and he says, “Why, the woman, nine times more than the man.” Well, for some reason that I don’t really understand, Hera, the wife of Zeus, took this badly and struck him blind. And Zeus, feeling a certain responsibility, gave Tiresias the gift of prophecy within his blindness. There’s a good point there—when your eyes are closed to distracting phenomena, you’re in your intuition, and you may come in touch with the morphology, the basic form of things.

MOYERS: Well, what’s the point—that Tiresias, having been transformed into a man and then a woman by the serpents, had knowledge of both the female and the male experience and knew more than either the god or the goddess knew alone?

CAMPBELL: That’s correct. Furthermore, he represented symbolically the fact of the unity of the two. And when Odysseus was sent to the underworld by Circe, his true initiation came when he met Tiresias and realized the unity of male and female.

MOYERS: I’ve often thought that if you could get in touch with your feminine side, or, if you’re a woman, your masculine side, you would know what the gods know and maybe beyond what the gods know.

CAMPBELL: That’s the information that one gets from being married. That’s the way you get in touch with your feminine side.

MOYERS: But what happens to this self-discovery in love when you meet someone else, and you suddenly feel, “I know that person,” or “I want to know that person”?

CAMPBELL: That’s very mysterious. It’s almost as though the future life that you’re going to have with that person has already told you, This is the one whom you will have that life with.

MOYERS: Is that something coming from within our inventory of memories that we don’t understand and don’t recognize? Reaching out and being touched by that person in a way—

CAMPBELL: It’s almost as though you were reacting to the future. It’s talking to you from what is to be. This has to do with the mystery of time and the transcendence of time. But I think we’re touching a very deep mystery here.

MOYERS: Do you in your own life just leave it there as a mystery? Or do you think that one can successfully have a marriage and a relationship other than the marriage?

CAMPBELL: Technically, one could say, “Why, yes, of course.”

MOYERS: But it seems that whatever one gives to the love affair is barred from the marriage relationship and diminishes the loyalty to the relationship.

CAMPBELL: I think one has to work out these things oneself. There could be a love seizure after you have a commitment to marriage, and it could be such a seizure that not responding to it might—what can I say?—dull the whole experience of the vitality of love.

MOYERS: I think that’s the core of the question. If the eyes scout for the heart and bring back that which the heart passionately desires, is the heart only going to desire once?

CAMPBELL: Love does not immunize the person to other relationships, let me just say that. But whether one could have a full-fledged love affair, I mean a real full-fledged love affair, and at the same time be loyal to the marriage—well, I don’t think that could happen now.

MOYERS: Because?

CAMPBELL: It would break off. But loyalty doesn’t forbid you to have an affectionate, even a loving relationship to another person of the opposite sex. The way in which the knightly romances describe the tenderness of the relationships to other women, of one who is being loyal to his own love, is very graceful and sensitive.

MOYERS: The troubadours would sing to their ladies even if there was very little hope of furthering a relationship with them.

CAMPBELL: Yes.

MOYERS: Now, does mythology say anything about whether it is better to have loved and lost?

CAMPBELL: Mythology in a general way doesn’t really deal with the problem of personal, individual love. One marries the one that one is allowed to marry, you know. If you belong to that clan, then you can marry that one but not that one, and so forth.

MOYERS: Then what does love have to do with morality? CAMPBELL: Violates it. MOYERS: Violates it?

CAMPBELL: Yes. Insofar as love expresses itself, it is not expressing itself in terms of the socially approved manners of life. That’s why it is all so secret. Love has nothing to do with social order. It is a higher spiritual experience than that of socially organized marriage.

MOYERS: When we say God is love, does that have anything to do with romantic love? Does mythology ever link romantic love and God?

CAMPBELL: That’s what it did do. Love was a divine visitation, and that’s why it was superior to marriage. That was the troubadour idea. If God is love, well then, love is God. Meister Eckhart said, “Love knows no pain.” And that’s exactly what Tristan meant when he said, “I’m willing to accept the pains of hell for my love.”

MOYERS: But you’ve been saying that love involves suffering.

CAMPBELL: That is the other idea. Tristan was experiencing love—Meister Eckhart was talking about it. The pain of love is not the other kind of pain, it is the pain of life. Where your pain is, there is your life, you might say.

MOYERS: There’s that passage in Corinthians where Paul says, “Love beareth all things, endureth all things.”

CAMPBELL: That’s the same thing.

MOYERS: And yet one of my favorite myths is the story from Persia that Satan was condemned to hell because he loved God so much.

CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s a basic Muslim idea about Satan being God’s greatest lover. There are a number of ways of thinking about Satan, but this is based on the question, Why was Satan thrown into hell? The standard story is that, when God created the angels, he told them to bow to none but himself. Then he created man, whom he regarded as a higher form than the angels, and he asked the angels to serve man. And Satan would not bow to man.

Now, this is interpreted in the Christian tradition, as I recall from my boyhood instruction, as being the egotism of Satan. He would not bow to man. But in the Persian story, he could not bow to man because of his love for God—he could bow only to God. God had changed his signals, do you see? But Satan had so committed himself to the first set of signals that he could not violate those, and in his—I don’t know if Satan has a heart or not—but in his mind, he could not bow to anyone but God, whom he loved. And then God says, “Get out of my sight.”

Now, the worst of the pains of hell, insofar as hell has been described, is the absence of the Beloved, which is God. So how does Satan sustain the situation in hell? By the memory of the echo of God’s voice, when God said, “Go to hell.” That is a great sign of love.

MOYERS: Well, it’s certainly true in life that the greatest hell one can know is to be separated from the one you love. That’s why I’ve liked the Persian myth. Satan is God’s lover—

CAMPBELL: —and he is separated from God, and that’s the real pain of Satan.

MOYERS: There’s another story from Persia about the first two parents.

CAMPBELL: That’s a great one, yes. They were really one in the beginning and grew as a kind of plant. But then they separated and became two, and begat children. And they loved the children so much that they ate them up. God thought, “Well, this can’t go on.” So he reduced parental love by something like ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent, so parents wouldn’t eat up their children.

MOYERS: What was that myth—

CAMPBELL: I’ve heard people say, “This is such a delicious little thing, I could eat it up.”

MOYERS: The power of love?

CAMPBELL: The power of love.

MOYERS: So intense it had to be reduced.

CAMPBELL: Yes. I saw a picture once of a mouth wide open swallowing more, and a heart was in it. That’s the kind of love that eats you up. That’s the kind of love that mothers have to learn to reduce.

MOYERS: Lord, teach me when to let go.

CAMPBELL: Yes. There were in India little rituals to help mothers let go, particularly of their sons. The guru, the chaplain of the family, would come and ask the mother to give him that which she most prized. And it might be some very valuable jewel or something. And then there were these exercises, where the mother would be learning to give up that which she most prized. And then, finally, she would have to give up her son.

MOYERS: So joy and pain are in love.

CAMPBELL: Yes. Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain.

MOYERS: But love bears all things.

CAMPBELL: Love itself is a pain, you might say—the pain of being truly alive.