JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Well, if you realize what the real problem is, and that is of losing primary primarily thinking about yourself and your own self-protection. Losing yourself, giving yourself to another, that’s a trial in itself, is it not? There’s a big transformation of consciousness that’s concerned. And what all the myths have to deal with is transformation of consciousness. That you’re thinking in this way, and you have now to think in that way.
BILL MOYERS: Well, how is the consciousness transformed?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: By the trials.
BILL MOYERS: The tests that the hero undergoes.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The tests or certain illuminating revelations. Trials and revelations are what it’s all about.
BILL MOYERS: Well, who in society today is making any heroic myth at all for us? Do movies do this, do movies create hero myths?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I don’t know. Now, my experience of movies, I mean, the significant experience I had of movies, was when I was a boy, and they were all really movies, They weren’t talkies, they were black and white movies, And I had a hero figure who meant something to me, and he served as a kind of model for myself in my physical character, and that was Douglas Fairbanks. I wanted to be a synthesis of Douglas Fairbanks and Leonardo da Vinci, that was my idea. But those were models, were roles, that came to me.
BILL MOYERS: Does a movie like Star Wars fill some of that need for the spiritual adventure, for the hero?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Oh, perfect, it does the cycle perfectly. It’s not simple morality play. It has to do with the powers of life and their inflection through the action of man. One of the wonderful things, I think, about this adventure into space, is that the narrator, the artist, the one thinking up the story, is in a field that is not covered by our own knowledge” you know, Though it’s much of the adventure in the old stories is where they go into regions that no one’s been in before. Well, we’ve now conquered the planet, so there are no empty spaces for the imagination to go forth and fight its own war, you know, with the powers, and that was the first thing I felt, there’s a whole new realm for the imagination to open out and live its forms.
BILL MOYERS: Do you, when you look at something like Star Wars, recognize some of the themes of the hero throughout mythology?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I think that George Lucas was using standard mythological figures. The old man as the adviser, well, specifically what he made me think of is the Japanese swordmaster.
(Clip from “Star Wars” )
OBI WAN KENOBI:Remember, a Jedi can feel the force flowing through him.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I’ve known some of those people, and this man has a bill of their character.
BILL MOYERS: Well, there’s something mythological, too, isnÃt there, in the sense that the hero is helped by this stranger who shows up and gives him some instrument, a sword or a sheaf of light, shaft of light?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes, but he gives him not only a physical instrument, but a psychological commitment and a psychological center,
(Clip from “Star Wars”)
OBI WAN KENOBI: This time, let go your conscious self and act on instinct.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: When he had him exercising with that strange weapon, and then pulled the mask over, that’s real Japanese Stuff.
(Clip from “Star Wars”)
DARTH VADER: I’ll take them myself.
BILL MOYERS: When I took our two sons to see it, they did the same thing the audience did; at that moment when the voice of Ben Kenobi says to Luke Skywalker in the climactic moment
(Clip from “Star Wars”),
OBI WAN KENOBI: Use the force, Luke. Let go. Luke.
BILL MOYERS: The audience broke out into elation and into applause.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: “They did. Well, you see, this thing communicates. It is in a language that is talking to young people today, And that’s marvelous.
BILL MOYERS: So the hero goes for something, he doesn’t just go along for the ride. He’s not a mere adventurer.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, a serendipitous adventure can take place, also, You know, what the word serendipity comes from? Comes from the Sanskrit Swarandwipa, the Isle of Silk, which was formerly the name of Ceylon, And it’s a story about a family that’s just rambling on it’s way to Ceylon, and all these adventures take place. And so you can have the serendipitous adventure as well.
BILL MOYERS: Is the adventurer who takes that kind of trip a hero in the mythological sense?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes, He is ready for it. This is a very interesting thing about these mythological themes. The achievement of the hero is one that he is ready for, and it’s really a manifestation of his character. And it’s amusing, the way in which the landscape and the conditions of the environment match the readiness of the hero. The adventure that he’s ready for is the one that he gets.
(Clip from “Star Wars”)
HAN SOLO: Look, I ain’t in this for your revolution and I’m not in it for you, Princess. I expect to be well paid. I’m in it for me.
BILL MOYERS: The mercenary, Solo, begins as a mercenary and ends up as a hero.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: He was a very practical guy, a materialist in his character, at least as he thought of himself. 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.
(Clip from “Star Wars”)
PRINCESS LElA: I love you.
HAN SOLO: I know.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: He thinks he’s an egoist, [and] he really isn’t, and that’s a very lovable kind of human being, I think, and there are lots of them functioning beautifully in the world. They think they’re working for themselves, very practical and all, but no, there’s something else pushing them.
BILL MOYERS: What did you think about the scene in the bar?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s my favorite, not only in this piece, but of many, many pieces I’ve ever seen.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, where you are is on the edge, you’re about to embark into the outlying spaces. And–
BILL MOYERS: The real adventure.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The real adventure. This is the jumping-off place, and there is where you meet people who’ve been out there, and they run the machines that go out there, and you haven’t been there. It reminds me a little bit in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the atmosphere before you start off the adventure. You’re in the seaport, and there’s old salts, seamen who’ve been on the sea, and that’s their world, and these are the space people, also.
(Clip from “Star Wars”)
HAN SOLO: I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
LUKE SKYWALKER: The walls are moving!
PRINCESS LElA: Don’t just stand there, try and brace it with something.
BILL MOYERS: My favorite scene was when they were in the garbage compacter, and the walls were closing in, and I thought, that’s like the belly of the whale that Jonah came out of.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s what it is, yes, that’s where they were, down in the belly of the whale.
BILL MOYERS: What’s the mythological significance of the belly?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It’s the descent into the dark. Jonah in the whale, I mean, that’s a standard motif of going into the whale’s belly and coming out again.
BILL MOYERS: Why must the hero do that?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The whale represents the personification, you might say, of all that is in the unconscious. In reading these things psychologically, water is the unconscious. The creature in the water would be the dynamism of the unconscious, which is dangerous and powerful and has to be controlled by consciousness.
The first stage in the hero adventure, when he starts off on adventure, is leaving the realm of light, which he controls and knows about. and moving toward the threshold. And it’s at the threshold that the monster of the abyss comes to meet him. And then there are two or three results: one, the hero is cut to pieces and descends into the abyss in fragments, to be resurrected; or he may kill the dragon power, as Siegfried does when he kills the dragon. But then he tastes the dragon blood, that is to say, he has to assimilate that power. And when Siegfried has killed the dragon and tasted the blood, he hears the song of nature; he has transcended his humanity, you know, and reassociated himself with the powers of nature, which are the powers of our life, from which our mind removes us.
You see, this thing up here, this consciousness, thinks it’s running the shop. It’s a secondary organ; 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.
(Clip from “Star Wars”)
DARTH VADER: Join me, and I will complete your training.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: When it does put itself in control, you get this Vader, the man who’s gone over to the intellectual side.
(Clip from “Star Wars”)
LUKE SKYWALKER: I’ll never join you!
DARTH VADER: If you only knew the power of the dark side.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: He isn’t thinking, or living in terms of humanity, he’s living in terms of a system. And this is the threat to our lives; we all face it, we all operate in our society in relation to a system. Now, is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity, or are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes?
BILL MOYERS: Would the hero with a thousand faces help us to answer that question, about how to change the system so that we are not serving it?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I don’t think it would help you to change the system, but it would help you to live in the system as a human being.
BILL MOYERS: By doing what?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, like Luke Skywalker, not going over, but resisting its impersonal claims.
BILL MOYERS: But I can hear someone out there in the audience 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.”
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: You bet it does. If the person doesn’t listen to the demands of his own spiritual and heart life, and insists on a certain program, you’re going to have a schizophrenic crack-up. The person has put himself off-center; he has aligned himself with a programmatic life, and it’s not the one the body’s interested in at all. And the world’s full of people who have stopped listening to themselves. In my own life, I’ve had many opportunities to commit myself to a system and to go with it, and to obey its requirements. My life has been that of a maverick; I would not submit.
BILL MOYERS: You really believe that the creative spirit ranges on its own out there, beyond the boundaries?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes, I do.
BILL MOYERS: Something of the hero in that, I don’t mean to suggest that you see yourself as a hero.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: No, I don’t, but I see myself as a maverick.
BILL MOYERS: So perhaps the hero lurks in each one of us, when we don’t know it
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, yes, I mean, our life evokes our character, and you find out more about yourself as you go on. And it’s very nice to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature, rather than your lower.
BILL MOYERS: Give me an example.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I’ll give you a story. I’m dealing with an Iroquois story right now. There’s a motif that comes in American Indian stories very often, what I call the refusal of suitors. A girl with her mother lived in a wigwam on the edge of the village. She was a very handsome girl, but extremely proud and would not accept any of the boys. They proposed to her through the mother, and the mother was terribly annoyed with her. Well, one day they’re out collecting wood, and they have gone a long way from the village. And while they are collecting the wood, a terrific darkness comes over them. Now, this wasn’t the darkness of night descending; when you have a darkness like that, there’s some magician at work somewhere. So the mother says, “Well, let’s gather some bark and make a little wigwam of bark, wigwam for ourselves, and collect wood for a fire, and we’ll just spend the night here.” So they do that, and the mother falls asleep.
And the girl looks up and there’s this magnificent guy standing there with a wampum sash, glorious, and feathers and all this kind-black feathers. He says, “I have come to marry you, and I’ll await your reply.” She accepts the guy, and the mother accepts the man, and he gives the mother the wampum belt to prove that he’s serious about all this. So he goes away with the girl; she has acquiesced. Mere human beings weren’t good enough for her, but here’s something that really– ah. So she’s in another domain.
Now, the adventure is marvelous. She goes with him to his village, and they enter his lodge. The people in there greet her and she feels very comfortable about it and all. And then the next day he says, “I’m going off to hunt.” So he leaves the lodge and the door is closed with a flap, there’s a flap. When he closes the flap, she hears this strange sound. So there’s the whole day and she’s just in the hut, and as evening comes, she hears that strange sound again. And the door flap is flung off and in comes this prodigious serpent with his tongue darting, and he puts his head in her lap, and says, “Now, you must search my head for lice,” and things like that, and she finds all kinds of horrible things there and kills them all. And then he withdraws, and in a moment after the door has been closed, it opens again and in he comes, he’s the same beautiful young man again, and said, “Were you afraid of me when I came in just now?” No, she says, she wasn’t at all afraid.
Next day he goes off to hunt, and then she leaves the lodge to gather wood. And the first thing she sees is an enormous serpent basking on the rocks. And then another, and then another, and she begins to feel very badly, very homesick and discouraged. Then the evening. the serpent and then the man again. The third day when he leaves, she decides she’s going to try to get out of this place. So she goes out and she’s standing in the woods thinking, and a voice speaks to her. She turns, and there’s a little old man there, and he says,
“Darling, you are in trouble. The man that you’ve married is one of seven brothers. They are great magicians, and like many people of this kind, their hearts are not in their bodies. There’s a collection of seven hearts in a bag that is hidden under the bed of the eldest, to whom you are married. You must go get that, and then we’ll deal with the next part of the adventure.”
She goes in and finds the bag of hearts and is running out, and a voice calls after her. “Stop. stop.” It’s the voice of the magician. And she continues to run and he says. “You may think you can get away from me, but you never can.” And just at that point, she hears the voice of the old man, he says, I’ll help you, dear.” And he’s pulling her out of the water; she didn’t even know that she was in water.
BILL MOYERS:
What does that say to you?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
That’s to say you have moved out of the hard land, the solid earth, and are in the field of the unconscious. And she had pulled herself into the transcendent realm and got caught in the negative powers of the abyss, and she’s being rescued now by the upper powers. What you have done has been to elevate yourself out of the local field and put yourself in the field of higher power, higher danger. And are you going to be able to handle it? If you are not eligible for this place into which you’ve put yourself, it’s going to be a demon marriage, it’s going to be a real mess. If you are eligible, it can be a glory that will give you a life that is yours, in your own way.
BILL MOYERS:
So these stories of mythology are simply
trying to express A Truth that can’t
be grasped any other way.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
It’s The Edge,
The Interface
between
What Can Be Known
and
What is Never to Be Discovered,
because it is a mystery transcendent
of all human research.
The Source of Life :
What is it?
No one knows.
BILL MOYERS:
Why are stories important
for getting at that?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Well. I think it’s important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery and of your own mystery, and it gives life a new zest, a new balance, a new harmony to do this. I mean, in therapy, in psychological therapy, when people find out what it is that’s ticking in them, they get straightened out. And what is it that life is. I find thinking in mythological terms has helped people, visibly you can see it happen.
BILL MOYERS:
How, what does it do?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
It erases anxieties, it puts them in accord with the inevitables of their life, and they can see the positive values of what are the negative aspects of what is positive. It’s whether you’re going to say no to the serpent or yes to the serpent, as easy as that.
BILL MOYERS: No to the adventure?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Yes. The adventure of
being alive, of Living.
