Joseph Campbell--Mythology of the First City States
"....it's hard for Us-Today, to realise what the perilous situation was of the early culture people in the near East the beginnings of Agriculture and domestication of animals for the Western world begins in the near East and the first signs occur somewhere around 10,000 BC we begin to see signs of the domestication of some of the animals of the neighborhood principally sheep and goats to begin with and then the pig comes in.
Now, there may have been an earlier beginning in Southeast Asia, the finds that are taking place now in Upper in Northern Thailand are really spectacular in Transforming Our picture of the origins of Agriculture and so forth but for the history of civilization in the in the uh in in the Western World this area of the near East is crucial decisive up to let's say 10,000 BC all people were foraging Nomads hunters and uh root and vegetable gatherers around 10,000 BC the idea of domesticating your own food begins to take place as a result of this you have a more substantial and dependable economic base and uh increasingly large communities can begin to build up brings in a whole new problem of cultural organisation you begin to have Specialists you begin to have people whose specialisation is tilling the soil others who are trading people trading for goods uh with other uh centers and You Begin then also to have governing people who govern these uh en large communities specialist tasks the problem of organizing the community and the organized Community the viable unit which consists of one can say principally what turn out to be four casts the governor the uh uh Priestly ones who keep in touch with the Divine sources of uh dream and uh myth and spiritual information the uh trading and Merchant people and the uh toiling uh um peasants uh these are coordinated around a spiritual centre that represents the point that, "We're all differently trained, serving the same Centre, and The City-itself becomes, what we're calling today, a Mandela a sacred circle with a center and we're all related to that --
Now, there were two different developments out of the early uh Agricultural and domestication of animal base in the riverlands and in the high mountain valleys where it was possible to raise crops the accent would be on agriculture in the broad grazing lands the accent was on animal domestication and so you have hering people and there is a distinct separation as early let's say as the 8th and 7th centuries the seventh millenniums 8,000 7,000 BC uh between the settled agriculturalists and the still nomadic hering people where you have herders the male is the important person he's the one that is rounding up the animals that is uh killing the animals and protecting this herd against another herd so you have a warrior accent whereas when the toiling is that of Agriculture the relationship is to the Earth which is the mother she brings forth life and she nourishes life and so the female principle is a dominant one there now in this near East Zone there were three main group groups of people in these uh divisions one was the people in the uh riverlands and the high valleys agriculturalist whose principal deity was the goddess who is the world mother and the others were the two great hering communities one in the North in southern Europe the uh indo-europeans who were her as of Caple and who were the domesticators of the horse and invented the war Chariot became people of tremendous uh military power and the other were the people of the Siro Arabian Desert who are the semites and uh these were her as of sheep and goats and later the domesticators of the camel which became then the war camel and so forth and so on I think the earliest representation of the camel that we have in literature is in the Old Testament where Rachel comes on a camel to Abraham so we have uh these two Warrior people fighting in on the relatively peaceful uh settled areas and so we find around the sixth millennium BC that the little settled communities begin to have walls and the protection against these Warrior people who were tough fighting people and ruthless uh whether they're Indo European or semites the same story there comes a time then when the shift of accent goes to these Warrior people who have come in and become the overlords the dominant ones over a toiling community and uh this is what happens when oh 2350 BC we read of sag and the first s of a god this was a Semitic Monarch who comes in over the earlier Sumerian people he comes in around he his dates about 2350 BC then about 2000 BC there's a su Ian restoration and this is the period of building of many building of the great zigurat and most of our Sumerian texts come from this period the very important King important for us because the documents come from his time uh king guda of lagash and it's in uh his libation vase it's a little vase about so big with a symbol on it of a central post and two serpents with seven interlocking this is the earliest example we have is this caducous and then two cherubim that say lion birds birds that are human animal bird like with crowns opening the portals of a gate to reveal this this comes from G of lagash 2000 BC uh it's at that time that we have a Sumerian Resurgence but then income another group of Semitic people and become dominant at the time of U uh hamurabi is around 1750 BC and this is the time of the Gil gamish story and uh the uh loss of the serpent power from the uh individual it goes over to the serpents it's a very interesting story it's connected with the gilgames but that time they the cities are again having to defend themselves against more and more of these invading people the Hebrews come in then uh a good while later as uh raiding people again and you can read it in the Book of Genesis and I me the book of Exodus rather and in the judges of uh and Joshua of what happens to a city when these Warrior people come in and so you can see the wall is a very important protective feature and the city then as the culture unit with its Center and its spiritual life the center is always a temple so that the spiritual information is what coordinates and uh and uh validates the city
When I die. they won’t say anything but. “John Milius. who wrote Apocalypse Now, died this week.”
The screenplay started when I was in USC’s film school – the West Point of Hollywood -with George Lucas. We hadn’t met Francis yet. George and I were the two ringleaders at school, making student films and winning awards. George was sort of the good boy and I was the bad boy. I lived in my car. I was an anarchist surfer, a complete, consummate rebel and an anti-intellectual of the worst kind. I was threatened with dismissal every other day. I’ve always had a problem with authority.
The specter of the Vietnam War was hanging over all our heads. I was the only one who wanted to enlist – everybody else wanted to go to Canada or get married. I figured sooner or later I was going to go. so I signed up for the Marine Air Program, but I had asthma. so I washed out. Then I had to reconfigure my life because I hadn’t planned on living past twenty-six – nobody in the Sixties planned on living very long – and I had assumed my legacy would be a smoking hole in the ground over there.
Today in filmmaking there are mainly people who want to be famous, who aren’t driven by the need to tell a story. They just want the fame. Hack then. I never thought about the potential rewards of anything I did. I didn’t think about whether I was going to be paid, whether I was going to get a new BMW or a house in Bel Air or any of that kind of shit. I had what I needed. I had my surfboard. I was fit. I had girls. I was trained. I was a weapon. I just needed a mission. I was STRAC: Strategic. Tough. Ready Around the Clock.
At USC I had a writing teacher, Mr. Irwin Blacker, who gave that mission to me. He’d tell us exotic Hollywood stories, including one about how many filmmakers had tried to do Heart of Darkness – most notably Orson Welles – but that nobody had been able to lick it. I had read the book when I was seventeen and had loved it.
So that did it. I said. Not only am I going to do my Vietnam movie. I’m going to use Heart of Darkness as an allegory because if you’re going to be passing under the skeleton of an elephant, it will be much better if that skeleton is the tail of a downed B-52. I had the ambitious idea of going to Vietnam and shooting the film there.
When George tells this story, exaggerating everything, he’ll say Milius was really insane. The truth is. they all wanted to go. Cinéma vérité had become a popular idea then with the emergence of films like Medium Cool which had been shot during the riots at the ’68 Chicago Democratic convention.
We were going to do it dirt cheap: shoot a feature film in 16 millimeter in Vietnam while the war was going on -- Who knows, maybe we would have all been killed.
