BILL MOYERS:
But Joe, can Westerners grasp this kind of
mystical trance theological experience?
It does transcend Theology,
it leaves theology behind.
I mean, if you’re locked to
the image of God in a culture
where Science determines
your perceptions of reality,
how can you experience
this ultimate ground that
the shamans talk about?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
The best example I know in our literature is
that beautiful book by John Neihardt called
Black Elk Speaks.
BILL MOYERS:
Black Elk was?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Black Elk was a young Sioux or Dakota,
as they are often called, boy around nine years old,
before the American cavalry had encountered the Sioux.
They were the great people of the plains.
And this boy became sick, psychologically sick.
His Family…I’m telling the typical shaman story.
The child begins to tremble, and is immobilized,
and the family’s terribly concerned about it.
And they send for a shaman who had had the experience in his own youth, to come as a psychoanalyst, you might say, and pull the youngster out of it.
But instead of relieving him of the deities,
he is adapting him to the deities,
and the deities to himself, you might say.
It’s a different problem from that of psychoanalysis.
I think it was Nietzsche who said,
“Be careful, lest in casting out your devil,
you cast out the best thing that’s in you.”
Here, the deities who have been encountered
the powers, let’s call them are retained.
The connection is retained, it’s not broken.
And these men then become the spiritual advisers and gift-givers
of Their People.
Well, what happened with this young boy, he was about nine years old, was he had a vision, and the vision is described, and it’s a vision prophetic of the terrible future that his tribe was to have.
But it also spoke of the possible positive aspects of it.
It was a vision of what he called the hoop of his nation, realizing that it was one of many hoops which is something that we haven’t all learned well enough yet and the cooperation of all the hoops and all the nations and grand processions and so forth.
But more than that, it was an experience of himself as going through the realms of spiritual imagery that were of his culture, and assimilating their import. And it comes to one great statement, which for me is a key statement of the understanding of myth and symbols.
He says,“I saw myself on
The Central Mountain of The World,
The Highest Place.
And I had A Vision, because I was seeing
in a sacred manner,
of The World.”
And the sacred central mountain
was Harney Peak in South Dakota.
And then he says,
“But the central mountain is everywhere.”
That is a real mythological realization.
BILL MOYERS:
Why?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
It distinguishes between the local cult image, Harney Peak,
and its connotation, the center of the world.
The center of the world is the hub of the universe, axis mundi, do you know, the central point, the pole star around which all revolves.
The Central Point of The World
is The Point where
Stillness and Movement are together.
Movement is Time,
Stillness is Eternity,
realising the relationship of the temporal moment
to the eternal not-moment,
but forever - is the Sense of Life.
Realising how this moment in your life is actually a moment of eternity,
and the experience of the eternal aspect
of what you’re doing in the temporal experience
is the mythological experience,
and he had it.
So is the central mountain of the world
Jerusalem, Rome, Banaras.
Lhasa, Mexico City, you know?
Mexico City, Jerusalem,
is symbolic of a spiritual principle
as the center of the world.
BILL MOYERS:
So this little Indian was saying, there is a shining point where all lines intersect?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
That’s exactly what he said.
BILL MOYERS:
He was saying God has no circumference.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
God is an intelligible sphere, let’s say a sphere known to the mind, not to the senses, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. And the center, Bill, is right where you’re sitting, and the other one is right where I’m sitting. And each of us is a manifestation of that mystery.
