Thou Art

BILL MOYERS: 

So The Story of The Buffalo’s Wife was told to confirm the reverence.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

That’s right.

BILL MOYERS: 

What happened when the white man came and slaughtered this animal of reverence?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

That was a sacramental violation. 

I mean, in the eighties, when the buffalo hunt was undertaken, you know, with Kit Carson…

BILL MOYERS: 

The 1880s, a hundred years ago.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

— and Buffalo Bill and so forth. When I was a boy, whenever we went for sleigh rides we had a buffalo robe. 

Buffalo, buffalo, buffalo robes all over the place. 

This was the sacred animal to the Indians. 

These hunters go out with repeating rifles, and then shoot down the whole herd and leave it there. 

Take the skin to sell and the body’s left to rot. 

This is a sacrilege, and it really is a sacrilege.

BILL MOYERS: 

It turned the buffalo from a “thou-”

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

To an “it.”

BILL MOYERS: 

The Indians addressed the buffalo as “thou.”

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

As a “thou”.

BILL MOYERS: 

As an object of reverence.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

The Indians addressed life as a “thou,” I mean, trees and stones, everything else. 

You can address anything as a “thou”, and you can feel the change in your psychology as you do it.

 The ego that sees a “thou” is not the same ego that sees an “it.” 

Your whole psychology changes when you address things as an “it.” 

And when you go to war with a people, 

the problem of the newspapers is to turn those people into its, so that they’re not “thous.”

BILL MOYERS: 

That was an incredible moment in the evolution of American society, when the buffalo were slaughtered. 

That was the final exclamation point behind the destruction of the Indian civilization, because you were destroying…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Can you imagine what the experience must have been for a people within 10 years to lose their environment, to lose their food supply, to lose the object of the… the central object of their ritual life?

BILL MOYERS: 

So it is in your belief that it was in this period of hunting man and woman, the time of hunting man, that human beings begin to sense a stirring of the mythic imagination, the wonder of things that they didn’t know.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

There is this burst of magnificent art and all the evidence you need of a mythic imagination in full career.