MASKS

Dr. Ray Stantz, 

The Heart of The Ghostbusters :

….it’s A Girl.

Dr. Egon Spengler :

It’s Gozer.

Winston :

I Thought “Gozer” was A Man --

Dr. Egon Spengler :

It’s Whatever it Wants to Be….

Venkman :

Well, whatever it is, 

it’s got to 

Get By Us --

Go Get Her, Ray!

Gozer The Gozarian…?

Good Evening….

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

We Want to Think about God. 

God is a Thought, God is an Idea, but its reference is to 

something that transcends

all Thinking. 

I mean, He’s Beyond Being, Beyond the category of 

Being or Nonbeing. 

Is He or is He not? Neither 

Is nor Is Not.

Every God, every mythology, every religion, is True 

in this sense : It is True 

as metaphorical of 

The Human and 

Cosmic Mystery.

He Who Thinks He Knows,

Doesn’t Know. 

He Who Knows that 

He Doesn’t Know, knows.

There is an old story 

that is still good — 

The Story of The Quest, 

The Spiritual Quest, 

that is to say, to find 

the inward thing that 

You basically are. 

All of these symbols in mythology refer to you — 

Have you been reborn? 

Have you died to your animal nature and come to life as a human incarnation? 

You are God in your deepest identity. 

You are one with the transcendent.

BILL MOYERS: 

The images of God are many. 

Joseph Campbell called them 

“The Masks of Eternity,” and said 

they both cover and reveal 

the face of glory. 

All our names and images for God are masks, Campbell said, 

they signify that ultimate reality, which by definition transcends language and art.

A Myth is a Mask of God, too, a metaphor for what lies behind the visible world. 

As teacher, scholar and writer, Joseph Campbell spent his life in the study of comparative religion. He wanted to know what it means that God assumes such different masks in different cultures. We go east of Suez and see people dancing before a bewildering array of fantastic gods. When those people come here, well, Campbell told the story of the young Hindu who called on him in New York and said, “When I visit a foreign country, I like to acquaint myself with its religion. So I bought myself a Bible and for some months now have been reading it from the beginning. 

But, you know, I can’t 

find any religion in it.”

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, realizing the relationship of the temporal moment to the eternal not moment, but forever -is the sense of life. Realizing 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.

My Dear Walkley

 

EPISTLE DEDICATORY TO ARTHUR BINGHAM WALKLEY

My dear Walkley:

You once asked me why I did not write a Don Juan play. The levity with which you assumed this frightful responsibility has probably by this time enabled you to forget it; but the day of reckoning has arrived: here is your play! I say your play, because qui facit per alium facit per se. Its profits, like its labor, belong to me: its morals, its manners, its philosophy, its influence on the young, are for you to justify. You were of mature age when you made the suggestion; and you knew your man. It is hardly fifteen years since, as twin pioneers of the New Journalism of that time, we two, cradled in the same new sheets, made an epoch in the criticism of the theatre and the opera house by making it a pretext for a propaganda of our own views of life. So you cannot plead ignorance of the character of the force you set in motion. You meant me to epater le bourgeois; and if he protests, I hereby refer him to you as the accountable party.

I warn you that if you attempt to repudiate your responsibility, I shall suspect you of finding the play too decorous for your taste. The fifteen years have made me older and graver. In you I can detect no such becoming change. Your levities and audacities are like the loves and comforts prayed for by Desdemona: they increase, even as your days do grow. No mere pioneering journal dares meddle with them now: the stately Times itself is alone sufficiently above suspicion to act as your chaperone; and even the Times must sometimes thank its stars that new plays are not produced every day, since after each such event its gravity is compromised, its platitude turned to epigram, its portentousness to wit, its propriety to elegance, and even its decorum into naughtiness by criticisms which the traditions of the paper do not allow you to sign at the end, but which you take care to sign with the most extravagant flourishes between the lines. I am not sure that this is not a portent of Revolution. In eighteenth century France the end was at hand when men bought the Encyclopedia and found Diderot there. When I buy the Times and find you there, my prophetic ear catches a rattle of twentieth century tumbrils.

However, that is not my present anxiety. The question is, will you not be disappointed with a Don Juan play in which not one of that hero's mille e tre adventures is brought upon the stage? To propitiate you, let me explain myself. You will retort that I never do anything else: it is your favorite jibe at me that what I call drama is nothing but explanation. But you must not expect me to adopt your inexplicable, fantastic, petulant, fastidious ways: you must take me as I am, a reasonable, patient, consistent, apologetic, laborious person, with the temperament of a schoolmaster and the pursuits of a vestryman. No doubt that literary knack of mine which happens to amuse the British public distracts attention from my character; but the character is there none the less, solid as bricks. I have a conscience; and conscience is always anxiously explanatory. You, on the contrary, feel that a man who discusses his conscience is much like a woman who discusses her modesty. The only moral force you condescend to parade is the force of your wit: the only demand you make in public is the demand of your artistic temperament for symmetry, elegance, style, grace, refinement, and the cleanliness which comes next to godliness if not before it. But my conscience is the genuine pulpit article: it annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making them think in order to bring them to conviction of sin. If you don't like my preaching you must lump it. I really cannot help it.

In the preface to my Plays for Puritans I explained the predicament of our contemporary English drama, forced to deal almost exclusively with cases of sexual attraction, and yet forbidden to exhibit the incidents of that attraction or even to discuss its nature. Your suggestion that I should write a Don Juan play was virtually a challenge to me to treat this subject myself dramatically. The challenge was difficult enough to be worth accepting, because, when you come to think of it, though we have plenty of dramas with heroes and heroines who are in love and must accordingly marry or perish at the end of the play, or about people whose relations with one another have been complicated by the marriage laws, not to mention the looser sort of plays which trade on the tradition that illicit love affairs are at once vicious and delightful, we have no modern English plays in which the natural attraction of the sexes for one another is made the mainspring of the action. That is why we insist on beauty in our performers, differing herein from the countries our friend William Archer holds up as examples of seriousness to our childish theatres. There the Juliets and Isoldes, the Romeos and Tristans, might be our mothers and fathers. Not so the English actress. The heroine she impersonates is not allowed to discuss the elemental relations of men and women: all her romantic twaddle about novelet-made love, all her purely legal dilemmas as to whether she was married or "betrayed," quite miss our hearts and worry our minds. To console ourselves we must just look at her. We do so; and her beauty feeds our starving emotions. Sometimes we grumble ungallantly at the lady because she does not act as well as she looks. But in a drama which, with all its preoccupation with sex, is really void of sexual interest, good looks are more desired than histrionic skill.

Let me press this point on you, since you are too clever to raise the fool's cry of paradox whenever I take hold of a stick by the right instead of the wrong end. Why are our occasional attempts to deal with the sex problem on the stage so repulsive and dreary that even those who are most determined that sex questions shall be held open and their discussion kept free, cannot pretend to relish these joyless attempts at social sanitation? Is it not because at bottom they are utterly sexless? What is the usual formula for such plays? A woman has, on some past occasion, been brought into conflict with the law which regulates the relations of the sexes. A man, by falling in love with her, or marrying her, is brought into conflict with the social convention which discountenances the woman. Now the conflicts of individuals with law and convention can be dramatized like all other human conflicts; but they are purely judicial; and the fact that we are much more curious about the suppressed relations between the man and the woman than about the relations between both and our courts of law and private juries of matrons, produces that sensation of evasion, of dissatisfaction, of fundamental irrelevance, of shallowness, of useless disagreeableness, of total failure to edify and partial failure to interest, which is as familiar to you in the theatres as it was to me when I, too, frequented those uncomfortable buildings, and found our popular playwrights in the mind to (as they thought) emulate Ibsen.

I take it that when you asked me for a Don Juan play you did not want that sort of thing. Nobody does: the successes such plays sometimes obtain are due to the incidental conventional melodrama with which the experienced popular author instinctively saves himself from failure. But what did you want? Owing to your unfortunate habit—you now, I hope, feel its inconvenience—of not explaining yourself, I have had to discover this for myself. First, then, I have had to ask myself, what is a Don Juan? Vulgarly, a libertine. But your dislike of vulgarity is pushed to the length of a defect (universality of character is impossible without a share of vulgarity); and even if you could acquire the taste, you would find yourself overfed from ordinary sources without troubling me. So I took it that you demanded a Don Juan in the philosophic sense.

Philosophically, Don Juan is a man who, though gifted enough to be exceptionally capable of distinguishing between good and evil, follows his own instincts without regard to the common statute, or canon law; and therefore, whilst gaining the ardent sympathy of our rebellious instincts (which are flattered by the brilliancies with which Don Juan associates them) finds himself in mortal conflict with existing institutions, and defends himself by fraud and farce as unscrupulously as a farmer defends his crops by the same means against vermin. The prototypic Don Juan, invented early in the XVI century by a Spanish monk, was presented, according to the ideas of that time, as the enemy of God, the approach of whose vengeance is felt throughout the drama, growing in menace from minute to minute. No anxiety is caused on Don Juan's account by any minor antagonist: he easily eludes the police, temporal and spiritual; and when an indignant father seeks private redress with the sword, Don Juan kills him without an effort. Not until the slain father returns from heaven as the agent of God, in the form of his own statue, does he prevail against his slayer and cast him into hell. The moral is a monkish one: repent and reform now; for to-morrow it may be too late. This is really the only point on which Don Juan is sceptical; for he is a devout believer in an ultimate hell, and risks damnation only because, as he is young, it seems so far off that repentance can be postponed until he has amused himself to his heart's content.

But the lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book. What attracts and impresses us in El Burlador de Sevilla is not the immediate urgency of repentance, but the heroism of daring to be the enemy of God. From Prometheus to my own Devil's Disciple, such enemies have always been popular. Don Juan became such a pet that the world could not bear his damnation. It reconciled him sentimentally to God in a second version, and clamored for his canonization for a whole century, thus treating him as English journalism has treated that comic foe of the gods, Punch. Moliere's Don Juan casts back to the original in point of impenitence; but in piety he falls off greatly. True, he also proposes to repent; but in what terms? "Oui, ma foi! il faut s'amender. Encore vingt ou trente ans de cette vie-ci, et puis nous songerons a nous." After Moliere comes the artist-enchanter, the master of masters, Mozart, who reveals the hero's spirit in magical harmonies, elfin tones, and elate darting rhythms as of summer lightning made audible. Here you have freedom in love and in morality mocking exquisitely at slavery to them, and interesting you, attracting you, tempting you, inexplicably forcing you to range the hero with his enemy the statue on a transcendant plane, leaving the prudish daughter and her priggish lover on a crockery shelf below to live piously ever after.

After these completed works Byron's fragment does not count for much philosophically. Our vagabond libertines are no more interesting from that point of view than the sailor who has a wife in every port, and Byron's hero is, after all, only a vagabond libertine. And he is dumb: he does not discuss himself with a Sganarelle-Leporello or with the fathers or brothers of his mistresses: he does not even, like Casanova, tell his own story. In fact he is not a true Don Juan at all; for he is no more an enemy of God than any romantic and adventurous young sower of wild oats. Had you and I been in his place at his age, who knows whether we might not have done as he did, unless indeed your fastidiousness had saved you from the empress Catherine. Byron was as little of a philosopher as Peter the Great: both were instances of that rare and useful, but unedifying variation, an energetic genius born without the prejudices or superstitions of his contemporaries. The resultant unscrupulous freedom of thought made Byron a greater poet than Wordsworth just as it made Peter a greater king than George III; but as it was, after all, only a negative qualification, it did not prevent Peter from being an appalling blackguard and an arrant poltroon, nor did it enable Byron to become a religious force like Shelley. Let us, then, leave Byron's Don Juan out of account. Mozart's is the last of the true Don Juans; for by the time he was of age, his cousin Faust had, in the hands of Goethe, taken his place and carried both his warfare and his reconciliation with the gods far beyond mere lovemaking into politics, high art, schemes for reclaiming new continents from the ocean, and recognition of an eternal womanly principle in the universe. Goethe's Faust and Mozart's Don Juan were the last words of the XVIII century on the subject; and by the time the polite critics of the XIX century, ignoring William Blake as superficially as the XVIII had ignored Hogarth or the XVII Bunyan, had got past the Dickens-Macaulay Dumas-Guizot stage and the Stendhal-Meredith-Turgenieff stage, and were confronted with philosophic fiction by such pens as Ibsen's and Tolstoy's, Don Juan had changed his sex and become Dona Juana, breaking out of the Doll's House and asserting herself as an individual instead of a mere item in a moral pageant.

Now it is all very well for you at the beginning of the XX century to ask me for a Don Juan play; but you will see from the foregoing survey that Don Juan is a full century out of date for you and for me; and if there are millions of less literate people who are still in the eighteenth century, have they not Moliere and Mozart, upon whose art no human hand can improve? You would laugh at me if at this time of day I dealt in duels and ghosts and "womanly" women. As to mere libertinism, you would be the first to remind me that the Festin de Pierre of Moliere is not a play for amorists, and that one bar of the voluptuous sentimentality of Gounod or Bizet would appear as a licentious stain on the score of Don Giovanni. Even the more abstract parts of the Don Juan play are dilapidated past use: for instance, Don Juan's supernatural antagonist hurled those who refuse to repent into lakes of burning brimstone, there to be tormented by devils with horns and tails. Of that antagonist, and of that conception of repentance, how much is left that could be used in a play by me dedicated to you? On the other hand, those forces of middle class public opinion which hardly existed for a Spanish nobleman in the days of the first Don Juan, are now triumphant everywhere. Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer. The women, "marchesane, principesse, cameriere, cittadine" and all, are become equally dangerous: the sex is aggressive, powerful: when women are wronged they do not group themselves pathetically to sing "Protegga il giusto cielo": they grasp formidable legal and social weapons, and retaliate. Political parties are wrecked and public careers undone by a single indiscretion. A man had better have all the statues in London to supper with him, ugly as they are, than be brought to the bar of the Nonconformist Conscience by Donna Elvira. Excommunication has become almost as serious a business as it was in the X century.

As a result, Man is no longer, like Don Juan, victor in the duel of sex. Whether he has ever really been may be doubted: at all events the enormous superiority of Woman's natural position in this matter is telling with greater and greater force. As to pulling the Nonconformist Conscience by the beard as Don Juan plucked the beard of the Commandant's statue in the convent of San Francisco, that is out of the question nowadays: prudence and good manners alike forbid it to a hero with any mind. Besides, it is Don Juan's own beard that is in danger of plucking. Far from relapsing into hypocrisy, as Sganarelle feared, he has unexpectedly discovered a moral in his immorality. The growing recognition of his new point of view is heaping responsibility on him. His former jests he has had to take as seriously as I have had to take some of the jests of Mr W. S. Gilbert. His scepticism, once his least tolerated quality, has now triumphed so completely that he can no longer assert himself by witty negations, and must, to save himself from cipherdom, find an affirmative position. His thousand and three affairs of gallantry, after becoming, at most, two immature intrigues leading to sordid and prolonged complications and humiliations, have been discarded altogether as unworthy of his philosophic dignity and compromising to his newly acknowledged position as the founder of a school. Instead of pretending to read Ovid he does actually read Schopenhaur and Nietzsche, studies Westermarck, and is concerned for the future of the race instead of for the freedom of his own instincts. Thus his profligacy and his dare-devil airs have gone the way of his sword and mandoline into the rag shop of anachronisms and superstitions. In fact, he is now more Hamlet than Don Juan; for though the lines put into the actor's mouth to indicate to the pit that Hamlet is a philosopher are for the most part mere harmonious platitude which, with a little debasement of the word-music, would be properer to Pecksniff, yet if you separate the real hero, inarticulate and unintelligible to himself except in flashes of inspiration, from the performer who has to talk at any cost through five acts; and if you also do what you must always do in Shakespear's tragedies: that is, dissect out the absurd sensational incidents and physical violences of the borrowed story from the genuine Shakespearian tissue, you will get a true Promethean foe of the gods, whose instinctive attitude towards women much resembles that to which Don Juan is now driven. From this point of view Hamlet was a developed Don Juan whom Shakespear palmed off as a reputable man just as he palmed poor Macbeth off as a murderer. To-day the palming off is no longer necessary (at least on your plane and mine) because Don Juanism is no longer misunderstood as mere Casanovism. Don Juan himself is almost ascetic in his desire to avoid that misunderstanding; and so my attempt to bring him up to date by launching him as a modern Englishman into a modern English environment has produced a figure superficially quite unlike the hero of Mozart.

And yet I have not the heart to disappoint you wholly of another glimpse of the Mozartian dissoluto punito and his antagonist the statue. I feel sure you would like to know more of that statue—to draw him out when he is off duty, so to speak. To gratify you, I have resorted to the trick of the strolling theatrical manager who advertizes the pantomime of Sinbad the Sailor with a stock of second-hand picture posters designed for Ali Baba. He simply thrusts a few oil jars into the valley of diamonds, and so fulfils the promise held out by the hoardings to the public eye. I have adapted this simple device to our occasion by thrusting into my perfectly modern three-act play a totally extraneous act in which my hero, enchanted by the air of the Sierra, has a dream in which his Mozartian ancestor appears and philosophizes at great length in a Shavio-Socratic dialogue with the lady, the statue, and the devil.

But this pleasantry is not the essence of the play. Over this essence I have no control. You propound a certain social substance, sexual attraction to wit, for dramatic distillation; and I distil it for you. I do not adulterate the product with aphrodisiacs nor dilute it with romance and water; for I am merely executing your commission, not producing a popular play for the market. You must therefore (unless, like most wise men, you read the play first and the preface afterwards) prepare yourself to face a trumpery story of modern London life, a life in which, as you know, the ordinary man's main business is to get means to keep up the position and habits of a gentleman, and the ordinary woman's business is to get married. In 9,999 cases out of 10,000, you can count on their doing nothing, whether noble or base, that conflicts with these ends; and that assurance is what you rely on as their religion, their morality, their principles, their patriotism, their reputation, their honor and so forth.

On the whole, this is a sensible and satisfactory foundation for society. Money means nourishment and marriage means children; and that men should put nourishment first and women children first is, broadly speaking, the law of Nature and not the dictate of personal ambition. The secret of the prosaic man's success, such as it is, is the simplicity with which he pursues these ends: the secret of the artistic man's failure, such as that is, is the versatility with which he strays in all directions after secondary ideals. The artist is either a poet or a scallawag: as poet, he cannot see, as the prosaic man does, that chivalry is at bottom only romantic suicide: as scallawag, he cannot see that it does not pay to spunge and beg and lie and brag and neglect his person. Therefore do not misunderstand my plain statement of the fundamental constitution of London society as an Irishman's reproach to your nation. From the day I first set foot on this foreign soil I knew the value of the prosaic qualities of which Irishmen teach Englishmen to be ashamed as well as I knew the vanity of the poetic qualities of which Englishmen teach Irishmen to be proud. For the Irishman instinctively disparages the quality which makes the Englishman dangerous to him; and the Englishman instinctively flatters the fault that makes the Irishman harmless and amusing to him. What is wrong with the prosaic Englishman is what is wrong with the prosaic men of all countries: stupidity. The vitality which places nourishment and children first, heaven and hell a somewhat remote second, and the health of society as an organic whole nowhere, may muddle successfully through the comparatively tribal stages of gregariousness; but in nineteenth century nations and twentieth century empires the determination of every man to be rich at all costs, and of every woman to be married at all costs, must, without a highly scientific social organization, produce a ruinous development of poverty, celibacy, prostitution, infant mortality, adult degeneracy, and everything that wise men most dread. In short, there is no future for men, however brimming with crude vitality, who are neither intelligent nor politically educated enough to be Socialists. So do not misunderstand me in the other direction either: if I appreciate the vital qualities of the Englishman as I appreciate the vital qualities of the bee, I do not guarantee the Englishman against being, like the bee (or the Canaanite) smoked out and unloaded of his honey by beings inferior to himself in simple acquisitiveness, combativeness, and fecundity, but superior to him in imagination and cunning.

The Don Juan play, however, is to deal with sexual attraction, and not with nutrition, and to deal with it in a society in which the serious business of sex is left by men to women, as the serious business of nutrition is left by women to men. That the men, to protect themselves against a too aggressive prosecution of the women's business, have set up a feeble romantic convention that the initiative in sex business must always come from the man, is true; but the pretence is so shallow that even in the theatre, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only on the inexperienced. In Shakespear's plays the woman always takes the initiative. In his problem plays and his popular plays alike the love interest is the interest of seeing the woman hunt the man down. She may do it by blandishment, like Rosalind, or by stratagem, like Mariana; but in every case the relation between the woman and the man is the same: she is the pursuer and contriver, he the pursued and disposed of. When she is baffled, like Ophelia, she goes mad and commits suicide; and the man goes straight from her funeral to a fencing match. No doubt Nature, with very young creatures, may save the woman the trouble of scheming: Prospero knows that he has only to throw Ferdinand and Miranda together and they will mate like a pair of doves; and there is no need for Perdita to capture Florizel as the lady doctor in All's Well That Ends Well (an early Ibsenite heroine) captures Bertram. But the mature cases all illustrate the Shakespearian law. The one apparent exception, Petruchio, is not a real one: he is most carefully characterized as a purely commercial matrimonial adventurer. Once he is assured that Katharine has money, he undertakes to marry her before he has seen her. In real life we find not only Petruchios, but Mantalinis and Dobbins who pursue women with appeals to their pity or jealousy or vanity, or cling to them in a romantically infatuated way. Such effeminates do not count in the world scheme: even Bunsby dropping like a fascinated bird into the jaws of Mrs MacStinger is by comparison a true tragic object of pity and terror. I find in my own plays that Woman, projecting herself dramatically by my hands (a process over which I assure you I have no more real control than I have over my wife), behaves just as Woman did in the plays of Shakespear.

And so your Don Juan has come to birth as a stage projection of the tragi-comic love chase of the man by the woman; and my Don Juan is the quarry instead of the huntsman. Yet he is a true Don Juan, with a sense of reality that disables convention, defying to the last the fate which finally overtakes him. The woman's need of him to enable her to carry on Nature's most urgent work, does not prevail against him until his resistance gathers her energy to a climax at which she dares to throw away her customary exploitations of the conventional affectionate and dutiful poses, and claim him by natural right for a purpose that far transcends their mortal personal purposes.

Among the friends to whom I have read this play in manuscript are some of our own sex who are shocked at the "unscrupulousness," meaning the total disregard of masculine fastidiousness, with which the woman pursues her purpose. It does not occur to them that if women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race. Is there anything meaner then to throw necessary work upon other people and then disparage it as unworthy and indelicate. We laugh at the haughty American nation because it makes the negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the negro by the fact that he is a shoeblack; but we ourselves throw the whole drudgery of creation on one sex, and then imply that no female of any womanliness or delicacy would initiate any effort in that direction. There are no limits to male hypocrisy in this matter. No doubt there are moments when man's sexual immunities are made acutely humiliating to him. When the terrible moment of birth arrives, its supreme importance and its superhuman effort and peril, in which the father has no part, dwarf him into the meanest insignificance: he slinks out of the way of the humblest petticoat, happy if he be poor enough to be pushed out of the house to outface his ignominy by drunken rejoicings. But when the crisis is over he takes his revenge, swaggering as the breadwinner, and speaking of Woman's "sphere" with condescension, even with chivalry, as if the kitchen and the nursery were less important than the office in the city. When his swagger is exhausted he drivels into erotic poetry or sentimental uxoriousness; and the Tennysonian King Arthur posing as Guinevere becomes Don Quixote grovelling before Dulcinea. You must admit that here Nature beats Comedy out of the field: the wildest hominist or feminist farce is insipid after the most commonplace "slice of life." The pretence that women do not take the initiative is part of the farce. Why, the whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women. Give women the vote, and in five years there will be a crushing tax on bachelors. Men, on the other hand, attach penalties to marriage, depriving women of property, of the franchise, of the free use of their limbs, of that ancient symbol of immortality, the right to make oneself at home in the house of God by taking off the hat, of everything that he can force Woman to dispense with without compelling himself to dispense with her. All in vain. Woman must marry because the race must perish without her travail: if the risk of death and the certainty of pain, danger and unutterable discomforts cannot deter her, slavery and swaddled ankles will not. And yet we assume that the force that carries women through all these perils and hardships, stops abashed before the primnesses of our behavior for young ladies. It is assumed that the woman must wait, motionless, until she is wooed. Nay, she often does wait motionless. That is how the spider waits for the fly. But the spider spins her web. And if the fly, like my hero, shows a strength that promises to extricate him, how swiftly does she abandon her pretence of passiveness, and openly fling coil after coil about him until he is secured for ever!

If the really impressive books and other art-works of the world were produced by ordinary men, they would express more fear of women's pursuit than love of their illusory beauty. But ordinary men cannot produce really impressive art-works. Those who can are men of genius: that is, men selected by Nature to carry on the work of building up an intellectual consciousness of her own instinctive purpose. Accordingly, we observe in the man of genius all the unscrupulousness and all the "self-sacrifice" (the two things are the same) of Woman. He will risk the stake and the cross; starve, when necessary, in a garret all his life; study women and live on their work and care as Darwin studied worms and lived upon sheep; work his nerves into rags without payment, a sublime altruist in his disregard of himself, an atrocious egotist in his disregard of others. Here Woman meets a purpose as impersonal, as irresistible as her own; and the clash is sometimes tragic. When it is complicated by the genius being a woman, then the game is one for a king of critics: your George Sand becomes a mother to gain experience for the novelist and to develop her, and gobbles up men of genius, Chopins, Mussets and the like, as mere hors d'oeuvres.

I state the extreme case, of course; but what is true of the great man who incarnates the philosophic consciousness of Life and the woman who incarnates its fecundity, is true in some degree of all geniuses and all women. Hence it is that the world's books get written, its pictures painted, its statues modelled, its symphonies composed, by people who are free of the otherwise universal dominion of the tyranny of sex. Which leads us to the conclusion, astonishing to the vulgar, that art, instead of being before all things the expression of the normal sexual situation, is really the only department in which sex is a superseded and secondary power, with its consciousness so confused and its purpose so perverted, that its ideas are mere fantasy to common men. Whether the artist becomes poet or philosopher, moralist or founder of a religion, his sexual doctrine is nothing but a barren special pleading for pleasure, excitement, and knowledge when he is young, and for contemplative tranquillity when he is old and satiated. Romance and Asceticism, Amorism and Puritanism are equally unreal in the great Philistine world. The world shown us in books, whether the books be confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main world at all: it is only the self-consciousness of certain abnormal people who have the specific artistic talent and temperament. A serious matter this for you and me, because the man whose consciousness does not correspond to that of the majority is a madman; and the old habit of worshipping madmen is giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real, education, as you no doubt observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, every mind that is not strong enough to see through the imposture and to use the great Masters of Arts as what they really are and no more: that is, patentees of highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and for the majority but half valid representations of life. The schoolboy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow's head makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him; and I observe with reassurance that you occasionally do the same, in your prime, with your Aristotle.

Fortunately for us, whose minds have been so overwhelmingly sophisticated by literature, what produces all these treatises and poems and scriptures of one sort or another is the struggle of Life to become divinely conscious of itself instead of blindly stumbling hither and thither in the line of least resistance. Hence there is a driving towards truth in all books on matters where the writer, though exceptionally gifted is normally constituted, and has no private axe to grind. Copernicus had no motive for misleading his fellowmen as to the place of the sun in the solar system: he looked for it as honestly as a shepherd seeks his path in a mist. But Copernicus would not have written love stories scientifically. When it comes to sex relations, the man of genius does not share the common man's danger of capture, nor the woman of genius the common woman's overwhelming specialization. And that is why our scriptures and other art works, when they deal with love, turn from honest attempts at science in physics to romantic nonsense, erotic ecstasy, or the stern asceticism of satiety ("the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" said William Blake; for "you never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough").

There is a political aspect of this sex question which is too big for my comedy, and too momentous to be passed over without culpable frivolity. It is impossible to demonstrate that the initiative in sex transactions remains with Woman, and has been confirmed to her, so far, more and more by the suppression of rapine and discouragement of importunity, without being driven to very serious reflections on the fact that this initiative is politically the most important of all the initiatives, because our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment, will ruin us if our citizens are ill bred.

When we two were born, this country was still dominated by a selected class bred by political marriages. The commercial class had not then completed the first twenty-five years of its new share of political power; and it was itself selected by money qualification, and bred, if not by political marriage, at least by a pretty rigorous class marriage. Aristocracy and plutocracy still furnish the figureheads of politics; but they are now dependent on the votes of the promiscuously bred masses. And this, if you please, at the very moment when the political problem, having suddenly ceased to mean a very limited and occasional interference, mostly by way of jobbing public appointments, in the mismanagement of a tight but parochial little island, with occasional meaningless prosecution of dynastic wars, has become the industrial reorganization of Britain, the construction of a practically international Commonwealth, and the partition of the whole of Africa and perhaps the whole of Asia by the civilized Powers. Can you believe that the people whose conceptions of society and conduct, whose power of attention and scope of interest, are measured by the British theatre as you know it to-day, can either handle this colossal task themselves, or understand and support the sort of mind and character that is (at least comparatively) capable of handling it? For remember: what our voters are in the pit and gallery they are also in the polling booth. We are all now under what Burke called "the hoofs of the swinish multitude." Burke's language gave great offence because the implied exceptions to its universal application made it a class insult; and it certainly was not for the pot to call the kettle black. The aristocracy he defended, in spite of the political marriages by which it tried to secure breeding for itself, had its mind undertrained by silly schoolmasters and governesses, its character corrupted by gratuitous luxury, its self-respect adulterated to complete spuriousness by flattery and flunkeyism. It is no better to-day and never will be any better: our very peasants have something morally hardier in them that culminates occasionally in a Bunyan, a Burns, or a Carlyle. But observe, this aristocracy, which was overpowered from 1832 to 1885 by the middle class, has come back to power by the votes of "the swinish multitude." Tom Paine has triumphed over Edmund Burke; and the swine are now courted electors. How many of their own class have these electors sent to parliament? Hardly a dozen out of 670, and these only under the persuasion of conspicuous personal qualifications and popular eloquence. The multitude thus pronounces judgment on its own units: it admits itself unfit to govern, and will vote only for a man morphologically and generically transfigured by palatial residence and equipage, by transcendent tailoring, by the glamor of aristocratic kinship. Well, we two know these transfigured persons, these college passmen, these well groomed monocular Algys and Bobbies, these cricketers to whom age brings golf instead of wisdom, these plutocratic products of "the nail and sarspan business as he got his money by." Do you know whether to laugh or cry at the notion that they, poor devils! will drive a team of continents as they drive a four-in-hand; turn a jostling anarchy of casual trade and speculation into an ordered productivity; and federate our colonies into a world-Power of the first magnitude? Give these people the most perfect political constitution and the soundest political program that benevolent omniscience can devise for them, and they will interpret it into mere fashionable folly or canting charity as infallibly as a savage converts the philosophical theology of a Scotch missionary into crude African idolatry.

I do not know whether you have any illusions left on the subject of education, progress, and so forth. I have none. Any pamphleteer can show the way to better things; but when there is no will there is no way. My nurse was fond of remarking that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and the more I see of the efforts of our churches and universities and literary sages to raise the mass above its own level, the more convinced I am that my nurse was right. Progress can do nothing but make the most of us all as we are, and that most would clearly not be enough even if those who are already raised out of the lowest abysses would allow the others a chance. The bubble of Heredity has been pricked: the certainty that acquirements are negligible as elements in practical heredity has demolished the hopes of the educationists as well as the terrors of the degeneracy mongers; and we know now that there is no hereditary "governing class" any more than a hereditary hooliganism. We must either breed political capacity or be ruined by Democracy, which was forced on us by the failure of the older alternatives. Yet if Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable voters: that is, of political critics who, if they cannot govern in person for lack of spare energy or specific talent for administration, can at least recognize and appreciate capacity and benevolence in others, and so govern through capably benevolent representatives? Where are such voters to be found to-day? Nowhere. Promiscuous breeding has produced a weakness of character that is too timid to face the full stringency of a thoroughly competitive struggle for existence and too lazy and petty to organize the commonwealth co-operatively. Being cowards, we defeat natural selection under cover of philanthropy: being sluggards, we neglect artificial selection under cover of delicacy and morality.

Yet we must get an electorate of capable critics or collapse as Rome and Egypt collapsed. At this moment the Roman decadent phase of panem et circenses is being inaugurated under our eyes. Our newspapers and melodramas are blustering about our imperial destiny; but our eyes and hearts turn eagerly to the American millionaire. As his hand goes down to his pocket, our fingers go up to the brims of our hats by instinct. Our ideal prosperity is not the prosperity of the industrial north, but the prosperity of the Isle of Wight, of Folkestone and Ramsgate, of Nice and Monte Carlo. That is the only prosperity you see on the stage, where the workers are all footmen, parlourmaids, comic lodging-letters and fashionable professional men, whilst the heroes and heroines are miraculously provided with unlimited dividends, and eat gratuitously, like the knights in Don Quixote's books of chivalry.

The city papers prate of the competition of Bombay with Manchester and the like. The real competition is the competition of Regent Street with the Rue de Rivoli, of Brighton and the south coast with the Riviera, for the spending money of the American Trusts. What is all this growing love of pageantry, this effusive loyalty, this officious rising and uncovering at a wave from a flag or a blast from a brass band? Imperialism: Not a bit of it. Obsequiousness, servility, cupidity roused by the prevailing smell of money. When Mr Carnegie rattled his millions in his pockets all England became one rapacious cringe. Only, when Rhodes (who had probably been reading my Socialism for Millionaires) left word that no idler was to inherit his estate, the bent backs straightened mistrustfully for a moment. Could it be that the Diamond King was no gentleman after all? However, it was easy to ignore a rich man's solecism. The ungentlemanly clause was not mentioned again; and the backs soon bowed themselves back into their natural shape.

But I hear you asking me in alarm whether I have actually put all this tub thumping into a Don Juan comedy. I have not. I have only made my Don Juan a political pamphleteer, and given you his pamphlet in full by way of appendix. You will find it at the end of the book. I am sorry to say that it is a common practice with romancers to announce their hero as a man of extraordinary genius, and to leave his works entirely to the reader's imagination; so that at the end of the book you whisper to yourself ruefully that but for the author's solemn preliminary assurance you should hardly have given the gentleman credit for ordinary good sense. You cannot accuse me of this pitiable barrenness, this feeble evasion. I not only tell you that my hero wrote a revolutionists' handbook: I give you the handbook at full length for your edification if you care to read it. And in that handbook you will find the politics of the sex question as I conceive Don Juan's descendant to understand them. Not that I disclaim the fullest responsibility for his opinions and for those of all my characters, pleasant and unpleasant. They are all right from their several points of view; and their points of view are, for the dramatic moment, mine also. This may puzzle the people who believe that there is such a thing as an absolutely right point of view, usually their own. It may seem to them that nobody who doubts this can be in a state of grace. However that may be, it is certainly true that nobody who agrees with them can possibly be a dramatist, or indeed anything else that turns upon a knowledge of mankind. Hence it has been pointed out that Shakespear had no conscience. Neither have I, in that sense.

You may, however, remind me that this digression of mine into politics was preceded by a very convincing demonstration that the artist never catches the point of view of the common man on the question of sex, because he is not in the same predicament. I first prove that anything I write on the relation of the sexes is sure to be misleading; and then I proceed to write a Don Juan play. Well, if you insist on asking me why I behave in this absurd way, I can only reply that you asked me to, and that in any case my treatment of the subject may be valid for the artist, amusing to the amateur, and at least intelligible and therefore possibly suggestive to the Philistine. Every man who records his illusions is providing data for the genuinely scientific psychology which the world still waits for. I plank down my view of the existing relations of men to women in the most highly civilized society for what it is worth. It is a view like any other view and no more, neither true nor false, but, I hope, a way of looking at the subject which throws into the familiar order of cause and effect a sufficient body of fact and experience to be interesting to you, if not to the play-going public of London. I have certainly shown little consideration for that public in this enterprise; but I know that it has the friendliest disposition towards you and me as far as it has any consciousness of our existence, and quite understands that what I write for you must pass at a considerable height over its simple romantic head. It will take my books as read and my genius for granted, trusting me to put forth work of such quality as shall bear out its verdict. So we may disport ourselves on our own plane to the top of our bent; and if any gentleman points out that neither this epistle dedicatory nor the dream of Don Juan in the third act of the ensuing comedy is suitable for immediate production at a popular theatre we need not contradict him. Napoleon provided Talma with a pit of kings, with what effect on Talma's acting is not recorded. As for me, what I have always wanted is a pit of philosophers; and this is a play for such a pit.

I should make formal acknowledgment to the authors whom I have pillaged in the following pages if I could recollect them all. The theft of the brigand-poetaster from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is deliberate; and the metamorphosis of Leporello into Enry Straker, motor engineer and New Man, is an intentional dramatic sketch for the contemporary embryo of Mr H. G. Wells's anticipation of the efficient engineering class which will, he hopes, finally sweep the jabberers out of the way of civilization. Mr Barrio has also, whilst I am correcting my proofs, delighted London with a servant who knows more than his masters. The conception of Mendoza Limited I trace back to a certain West Indian colonial secretary, who, at a period when he and I and Mr Sidney Webb were sowing our political wild oats as a sort of Fabian Three Musketeers, without any prevision of the surprising respectability of the crop that followed, recommended Webb, the encyclopedic and inexhaustible, to form himself into a company for the benefit of the shareholders. Octavius I take over unaltered from Mozart; and I hereby authorize any actor who impersonates him, to sing "Dalla sua pace" (if he can) at any convenient moment during the representation. Ann was suggested to me by the fifteenth century Dutch morality called Everyman, which Mr William Poel has lately resuscitated so triumphantly. I trust he will work that vein further, and recognize that Elizabethan Renascence fustian is no more bearable after medieval poesy than Scribe after Ibsen. As I sat watching Everyman at the Charterhouse, I said to myself Why not Everywoman? Ann was the result: every woman is not Ann; but Ann is Everywoman.

That the author of Everyman was no mere artist, but an artist-philosopher, and that the artist-philosophers are the only sort of artists I take quite seriously, will be no news to you. Even Plato and Boswell, as the dramatists who invented Socrates and Dr Johnson, impress me more deeply than the romantic playwrights. Ever since, as a boy, I first breathed the air of the transcendental regions at a performance of Mozart's Zauberflote, I have been proof against the garish splendors and alcoholic excitements of the ordinary stage combinations of Tappertitian romance with the police intelligence. Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth and Turner (these four apart and above all the English Classics), Goethe, Shelley, Schopenhaur, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche are among the writers whose peculiar sense of the world I recognize as more or less akin to my own. Mark the word peculiar. I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens's sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations; and Shakespear's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader: they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the world was to Shakespear a great "stage of fools" on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living at all; and Dickens saved himself from the despair of the dream in The Chimes by taking the world for granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but when the moment came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh, that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial external stimulus to make it work. This is what is the matter with Hamlet all through: he has no will except in his bursts of temper. Foolish Bardolaters make a virtue of this after their fashion: they declare that the play is the tragedy of irresolution; but all Shakespear's projections of the deepest humanity he knew have the same defect: their characters and manners are lifelike; but their actions are forced on them from without, and the external force is grotesquely inappropriate except when it is quite conventional, as in the case of Henry V. Falstaff is more vivid than any of these serious reflective characters, because he is self-acting: his motives are his own appetites and instincts and humors. Richard III, too, is delightful as the whimsical comedian who stops a funeral to make love to the corpse's widow; but when, in the next act, he is replaced by a stage villain who smothers babies and offs with people's heads, we are revolted at the imposture and repudiate the changeling. Faulconbridge, Coriolanus, Leontes are admirable descriptions of instinctive temperaments: indeed the play of Coriolanus is the greatest of Shakespear's comedies; but description is not philosophy; and comedy neither compromises the author nor reveals him. He must be judged by those characters into which he puts what he knows of himself, his Hamlets and Macbeths and Lears and Prosperos. If these characters are agonizing in a void about factitious melodramatic murders and revenges and the like, whilst the comic characters walk with their feet on solid ground, vivid and amusing, you know that the author has much to show and nothing to teach. The comparison between Falstaff and Prospero is like the comparison between Micawber and David Copperfield. At the end of the book you know Micawber, whereas you only know what has happened to David, and are not interested enough in him to wonder what his politics or religion might be if anything so stupendous as a religious or political idea, or a general idea of any sort, were to occur to him. He is tolerable as a child; but he never becomes a man, and might be left out of his own biography altogether but for his usefulness as a stage confidant, a Horatio or "Charles his friend" what they call on the stage a feeder.

Now you cannot say this of the works of the artist-philosophers. You cannot say it, for instance, of The Pilgrim's Progress. Put your Shakespearian hero and coward, Henry V and Pistol or Parolles, beside Mr Valiant and Mr Fearing, and you have a sudden revelation of the abyss that lies between the fashionable author who could see nothing in the world but personal aims and the tragedy of their disappointment or the comedy of their incongruity, and the field preacher who achieved virtue and courage by identifying himself with the purpose of the world as he understood it. The contrast is enormous: Bunyan's coward stirs your blood more than Shakespear's hero, who actually leaves you cold and secretly hostile. You suddenly see that Shakespear, with all his flashes and divinations, never understood virtue and courage, never conceived how any man who was not a fool could, like Bunyan's hero, look back from the brink of the river of death over the strife and labor of his pilgrimage, and say "yet do I not repent me"; or, with the panache of a millionaire, bequeath "my sword to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it." This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and the like.

It may seem a long step from Bunyan to Nietzsche; but the difference between their conclusions is purely formal. Bunyan's perception that righteousness is filthy rags, his scorn for Mr Legality in the village of Morality, his defiance of the Church as the supplanter of religion, his insistence on courage as the virtue of virtues, his estimate of the career of the conventionally respectable and sensible Worldly Wiseman as no better at bottom than the life and death of Mr Badman: all this, expressed by Bunyan in the terms of a tinker's theology, is what Nietzsche has expressed in terms of post-Darwinian, post-Schopenhaurian philosophy; Wagner in terms of polytheistic mythology; and Ibsen in terms of mid-XIX century Parisian dramaturgy. Nothing is new in these matters except their novelties: for instance, it is a novelty to call Justification by Faith "Wille," and Justification by Works "Vorstellung." The sole use of the novelty is that you and I buy and read Schopenhaur's treatise on Will and Representation when we should not dream of buying a set of sermons on Faith versus Works. At bottom the controversy is the same, and the dramatic results are the same. Bunyan makes no attempt to present his pilgrims as more sensible or better conducted than Mr Worldly Wiseman. Mr W. W.'s worst enemies, as Mr Embezzler, Mr Never-go-to-Church-on-Sunday, Mr Bad Form, Mr Murderer, Mr Burglar, Mr Co-respondent, Mr Blackmailer, Mr Cad, Mr Drunkard, Mr Labor Agitator and so forth, can read the Pilgrim's Progress without finding a word said against them; whereas the respectable people who snub them and put them in prison, such as Mr W.W. himself and his young friend Civility; Formalist and Hypocrisy; Wildhead, Inconsiderate, and Pragmatick (who were clearly young university men of good family and high feeding); that brisk lad Ignorance, Talkative, By-Ends of Fairspeech and his mother-in-law Lady Feigning, and other reputable gentlemen and citizens, catch it very severely. Even Little Faith, though he gets to heaven at last, is given to understand that it served him right to be mobbed by the brothers Faint Heart, Mistrust, and Guilt, all three recognized members of respectable society and veritable pillars of the law. The whole allegory is a consistent attack on morality and respectability, without a word that one can remember against vice and crime. Exactly what is complained of in Nietzsche and Ibsen, is it not? And also exactly what would be complained of in all the literature which is great enough and old enough to have attained canonical rank, officially or unofficially, were it not that books are admitted to the canon by a compact which confesses their greatness in consideration of abrogating their meaning; so that the reverend rector can agree with the prophet Micah as to his inspired style without being committed to any complicity in Micah's furiously Radical opinions. Why, even I, as I force myself; pen in hand, into recognition and civility, find all the force of my onslaught destroyed by a simple policy of non-resistance. In vain do I redouble the violence of the language in which I proclaim my heterodoxies. I rail at the theistic credulity of Voltaire, the amoristic superstition of Shelley, the revival of tribal soothsaying and idolatrous rites which Huxley called Science and mistook for an advance on the Pentateuch, no less than at the welter of ecclesiastical and professional humbug which saves the face of the stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry. Even atheists reproach me with infidelity and anarchists with nihilism because I cannot endure their moral tirades. And yet, instead of exclaiming "Send this inconceivable Satanist to the stake," the respectable newspapers pith me by announcing "another book by this brilliant and thoughtful writer." And the ordinary citizen, knowing that an author who is well spoken of by a respectable newspaper must be all right, reads me, as he reads Micah, with undisturbed edification from his own point of view. It is narrated that in the eighteen-seventies an old lady, a very devout Methodist, moved from Colchester to a house in the neighborhood of the City Road, in London, where, mistaking the Hall of Science for a chapel, she sat at the feet of Charles Bradlaugh for many years, entranced by his eloquence, without questioning his orthodoxy or moulting a feather of her faith. I fear I small be defrauded of my just martyrdom in the same way.

However, I am digressing, as a man with a grievance always does. And after all, the main thing in determining the artistic quality of a book is not the opinions it propagates, but the fact that the writer has opinions. The old lady from Colchester was right to sun her simple soul in the energetic radiance of Bradlaugh's genuine beliefs and disbeliefs rather than in the chill of such mere painting of light and heat as elocution and convention can achieve. My contempt for belles lettres, and for amateurs who become the heroes of the fanciers of literary virtuosity, is not founded on any illusion of mind as to the permanence of those forms of thought (call them opinions) by which I strive to communicate my bent to my fellows. To younger men they are already outmoded; for though they have no more lost their logic than an eighteenth century pastel has lost its drawing or its color, yet, like the pastel, they grow indefinably shabby, and will grow shabbier until they cease to count at all, when my books will either perish, or, if the world is still poor enough to want them, will have to stand, with Bunyan's, by quite amorphous qualities of temper and energy. With this conviction I cannot be a bellettrist. No doubt I must recognize, as even the Ancient Mariner did, that I must tell my story entertainingly if I am to hold the wedding guest spellbound in spite of the siren sounds of the loud bassoon. But "for art's sake" alone I would not face the toil of writing a single sentence. I know that there are men who, having nothing to say and nothing to write, are nevertheless so in love with oratory and with literature that they keep desperately repeating as much as they can understand of what others have said or written aforetime. I know that the leisurely tricks which their want of conviction leaves them free to play with the diluted and misapprehended message supply them with a pleasant parlor game which they call style. I can pity their dotage and even sympathize with their fancy. But a true original style is never achieved for its own sake: a man may pay from a shilling to a guinea, according to his means, to see, hear, or read another man's act of genius; but he will not pay with his whole life and soul to become a mere virtuoso in literature, exhibiting an accomplishment which will not even make money for him, like fiddle playing. Effectiveness of assertion is the Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him. Disprove his assertion after it is made, yet its style remains. Darwin has no more destroyed the style of Job nor of Handel than Martin Luther destroyed the style of Giotto. All the assertions get disproved sooner or later; and so we find the world full of a magnificent debris of artistic fossils, with the matter-of-fact credibility gone clean out of them, but the form still splendid. And that is why the old masters play the deuce with our mere susceptibles. Your Royal Academician thinks he can get the style of Giotto without Giotto's beliefs, and correct his perspective into the bargain. Your man of letters thinks he can get Bunyan's or Shakespear's style without Bunyan's conviction or Shakespear's apprehension, especially if he takes care not to split his infinitives. And so with your Doctors of Music, who, with their collections of discords duly prepared and resolved or retarded or anticipated in the manner of the great composers, think they can learn the art of Palestrina from Cherubim's treatise. All this academic art is far worse than the trade in sham antique furniture; for the man who sells me an oaken chest which he swears was made in the XIII century, though as a matter of fact he made it himself only yesterday, at least does not pretend that there are any modern ideas in it, whereas your academic copier of fossils offers them to you as the latest outpouring of the human spirit, and, worst of all, kidnaps young people as pupils and persuades them that his limitations are rules, his observances dexterities, his timidities good taste, and his emptinesses purities. And when he declares that art should not be didactic, all the people who have nothing to teach and all the people who don't want to learn agree with him emphatically.

I pride myself on not being one of these susceptible: If you study the electric light with which I supply you in that Bumbledonian public capacity of mine over which you make merry from time to time, you will find that your house contains a great quantity of highly susceptible copper wire which gorges itself with electricity and gives you no light whatever. But here and there occurs a scrap of intensely insusceptible, intensely resistant material; and that stubborn scrap grapples with the current and will not let it through until it has made itself useful to you as those two vital qualities of literature, light and heat. Now if I am to be no mere copper wire amateur but a luminous author, I must also be a most intensely refractory person, liable to go out and to go wrong at inconvenient moments, and with incendiary possibilities. These are the faults of my qualities; and I assure you that I sometimes dislike myself so much that when some irritable reviewer chances at that moment to pitch into me with zest, I feel unspeakably relieved and obliged. But I never dream of reforming, knowing that I must take myself as I am and get what work I can out of myself. All this you will understand; for there is community of material between us: we are both critics of life as well as of art; and you have perhaps said to yourself when I have passed your windows, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." An awful and chastening reflection, which shall be the closing cadence of this immoderately long letter from yours faithfully,

G. BERNARD SHAW. WOKING, 1903

Thou

 

“The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. 

But how can you buy or sell the sky, the land? 

The Idea is strange to us. Every part of this earth is sacred to My People. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, all are holy in the memory and experience of My People. 

We’re part of The Earth and it is part of Us. 

The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. Each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of My People. 

The Water’s murmur is The Voice of My Father’s Father; The Rivers are Our Brothers. They carry our canoes and feed our children.

If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to Us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. 

This we know : The Earth does not belong to Man. Man belongs to The Earth. 

All things are connected, like the blood that unites us all. 

Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

“Your Destiny is A Mystery to Us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? What will happen when the secret corners of The Forest are heavy with the scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires? 

The end of Living and the beginning of Survival. 

When the last red man has vanished with his wilderness and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any spirit of My People left? 

We love this earth as the newborn loves its mother’s heartbeat. 

So, if we sell you Our Land, love it as we have loved it; care for it as we’ve cared for it, hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. 

Preserve the land for all children and love it, as God loves us all.

One thing we know, there is only one God; 

no Man be he Red Man or White Man can be apart. 

We are Brothers, after all.”

-- Chief Seattle, 1852.

An American Pickle / Fight Scene (I Will Do Violence)

Ben Greenbaum :

Is there a lot of Woods in Schlupsk? 

Herschel Greenbaum :

Forest.

Ben Greenbaum :

What's The Difference? 

Herschel Greenbaum :

Forest have Wolf. 

Ben Greenbaum :

Oh, wow. 

Herschel Greenbaum :

Sarah loved to chase Wolf. 

She would club them with stick, 

hit them with rock, Kill Them. 

Very good time. 

BILL MOYERS: Sacred places : Delphi, Machu Picchu, Stonehenge, Jerusalem. We recognize these as places where societies came together to express their spiritual concerns. But for some very early societies, as Joseph Campbell points out in his Historical Atlas of World Mythology, the whole earth was a sacred place, whether living on the wide plains under the great dome of the open sky, or in dense forest under a canopy of trees, our ancestors saw the sacred in everything around them. The voices of the gods spoke from the wind and thunder, and the spirit of God flowed in every mountain stream. It was a geography not of city and nation-states, but of sacred places, the realm of the mythic imagination.

As our ancestors turned from hunting to planting, the stories they told to interpret the mysteries of life changed, too. Now the seed instead of the animal became the symbol of life, death and resurrection. The plant died, was buried, and its seed born again. To spiritual visionaries this image reveals a divine truth as well as a principle of life itself. From death comes life; from sacrifice, bliss.

Joseph Campbell explored the nature of these places and the relation of myth to landscape. He visited many of the world’s sacred places in preparing the first two volumes of his Atlas: The Way of the Animal Powers and The Way of the Seeded Earth. But as he often reminded his students at Sarah Lawrence College, “You don’t have to go on a pilgrimage to find your own sacred place, where you can follow your bliss and nourish the activity of your own creative imagination.”

(interviewing) 

BILL MOYERS: What does it mean, to have a sacred place?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: This is a term I like to use now as an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour a day or so, where you do not know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe to anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you, but a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. And first you may find that nothing’s happening there, but if you have a sacred place and use it, and take advantage of it, something will happen.

BILL MOYERS: This place does for you what the plains did for The Hunter…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: For them the whole thing was a sacred place, do you see? But most of our action is economically or socially determined, and does not come out of our life. I don’t know whether you’ve had the experience I’ve had, but as you get older, the claims of the environment upon you are so great that you hardly know where the hell you are. What is it you intended? You’re always doing something that is required of you this minute, that minute, another minute. Where is your bliss station, you know? Try to find it. Get a phonograph and put on the records, the music, that you really love. Even if it’s corny music that nobody else respects, I mean, the one that you like or the book you want to read, get it done and have a place in which to do it. There you get the “thou” feeling of life. These people had it for the whole world that they were living in.

BILL MOYERS: We talked about the effect of the spreading plain on mythology, this plain clearly bounded by a circular horizon with that great blue dome of an exalting heaven above. Hawks and eagles hovering, the blazing sun passing, the night moon rising. And I can see the effect on people’s stories of that, but what about the people who lived in the dense foliage of The Jungle?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Total transformation of environment and of psychology and everything else.

BILL MOYERS: No Horizon?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: No Horizon.

BILL MOYERS: No Dome of The Sky?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: No Dome of The Sky. A lot of birds up there, and the heavy vegetation underneath, with scorpions and poisonous serpents, and in between, distances of trees and trees and trees. No sense of perspective. Colin Turnbull tells us a marvelous story of bringing a pygmy out of the forest. He brings this pygmy, who had never been out of the jungle, onto a mountaintop, and suddenly they come over the hill, and there’s an extensive plain out there. And the poor little fellow was utterly terrified, had no way of judging perspective and distance, he thought that the animals grazing on the plain out there were so small that they were ants, that they were just across the way, and so forth, and just totally baffled, he rushes back into The Forest. You have a different mythology there, you have a different relationship to The Hunt and everything else.

The Forest is Home. You are at home in the forest, where you and I would be perhaps ill at ease, thinking what’s behind that tree, and all this kind of thing. The sense of the beautiful, simple delight in there, the forest and the deities, the master of the forest, the forest master.

BILL MOYERS: What impresses me is that these people, the hunters and the searchers for the roots and for the berries, they’re participating in their landscape, they are pan of that world.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: And it becomes sacred to them. Place becomes sacred.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Every feature of it does.

BILL MOYERS: We moderns are stripping the world of its natural revelations of nature.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I know it.

BILL MOYERS: I think of a … remember that wonderful pygmy legend of the little boy who finds the song of the most beautiful … the bird of the most beautiful song in the forest?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And he brings it home, doesn’t he? And he asks his father to bring food for the bird, and the father doesn’t want to feed only a bird. And one time the father kills the bird, and when he killed the bird, he killed his own life, and he died.

BILL MOYERS: That’s it. And The Tegend says, the man killed the bird, and with the bird he killed the song, and with the song himself. Isn’t that a story about what happens when human beings destroy their environment, destroy their world, destroy nature and the revelation of nature?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Destroy their own nature.

BILL MOYERS: Human nature, too. They kill the song.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: They kill the song.

BILL MOYERS: And isn’t mythology the story of the song?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Mythology is the song. It’s the flight of the imagination, inspired by the energies of the body and in its life.

BILL MOYERS: What happened as human beings turned from the hunting of animals to the planting of seeds? What happened to the mythic imagination?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I try to think of it this way. An animal, as I think I’ve said before, is sort of a total entity, and when you kill that animal, that animal is dead. But when you cut down a plant, new sprouts come out. Pruning is, you know, helpful to a plant. Also in forests where a good deal of the origination of myth is to be recognized, out of rock comes life, even in these forests here, of the beautiful redwoods. I was in a wonderful forest right near Mendocino, and there are some great, great stumps from enormous trees that were cut down some decades and decades ago. And out of them are coming these bright new little children who are part of the same plant. 

So there’s a sense of death as not Death somehow, that death is required for new fresh life and so on. 

And The Individual isn’t quite An Individual, 
He is a Member of a Plant. 

Jesus uses the term, you know, where he says, “I am the vine and you are the branches.” That vineyard idea is a totally different one from the separate entity of the animal.

BILL MOYERS: And this makes a difference on the stories you tell about…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Oh, the whole feeling about what life is.

BILL MOYERS: What stories did this experience of the planter give rise to? Your favorite stories in plant mythology.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the cutting up and burial and then growing of the plant world, the world of the plant that you eat being already a cut up dead body, is the dominant motif, I would say, in the most of the tales. It occurs all over the place, particularly in the Pacific cultures and in the Americas.

BILL MOYERS: Tell me that story of the origin of maize, as Longfellow borrowed it from the Chippewas, didn’t he, or the Algonquins?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, it’s an Algonquian story, and it is simply of the boy in his vision, he sees a young man come to him with plumes on his head, and green and so forth, and visitant invites the young man to a wrestling match, and allows him to win. He wins and wins, this happens three or four times; but he tells him, “The last time I come, you must kill me and bury me, and take care of the place where you will have buried me.” And the boy then in the last one actually does what he has been told to do, plants the man, the visitant, and in time comes back and sees the com growing. And it was a boy who had been concerned for his father, who was a hunter but old, and he was thinking, isn’t there some other way to get food besides this one. And so it came to him out of his intentions. A lovely story.

BILL MOYERS: Some other way of getting food than hunting.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: But the idea is that this visitor, this figure in the vision, has to die and be buried before the plant can grow from the remains of his body.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s the main theme. It comes up, I mean, almost the duplicate of this one, throughout Polynesia, for instance.

BILL MOYERS: Well, there’s one in Polynesia about the legend of the maiden Hina, do you remember that one?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, all of the legends in the Polynesian area have a maiden named Hina. And she’s associated with the moon, and you know, the death and resurrection of the moon is a dominant theme.

BILL MOYERS: What happens to her in this legend?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the girl who loves to bathe in a certain pool, and there’s a great eel that is swimming around in the pool, and day after day he scrapes across her thigh as she’s bathing. And then one fine lovely day he turns into a young man, and he becomes her lover for a moment, and then goes away and comes back again and back again, and then one time when he comes he says, just as the Algonquian visitant, “Now, next time I come to visit you, you must kill me, and cut off my head and bury my head.” And she does so, and there grows from the buried head a coconut tree. And when you pick a coconut and look at the coconut, you can see it’s just the size of the head, and you can see eyes and things in the little nodules that simulate the head.

BILL MOYERS: So what you have is the same story springing up in cultures unrelated to each other. What is this saying?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, to such an extent that it’s stunning. And after years and years and years of reading these things, I am still overwhelmed at the similarities in cultures that are far, far apart. There are two explanations of this. Now, one explanation is that the human psyche is essentially the same all over the world. It is the inward aspect of the human body, which is essentially the same all over the world, with the same organs, with the same instincts, with the same impulse systems, with the same conflicts, the same fears.

There is also the counter theory of diffusion. Now, for instance, when agriculture is first developed, let’s say, in the Near East or in Southeast Asia, I mean, these are the two big centers in the old world, then the art of tilling the soil goes forth from this area. And along with it goes a mythology that has to do with fertilizing the earth and bringing up the plants, killing the body, cutting it up, burying it and having the plant come. That myth will go with the agricultural tradition. You won’t find it in a planting in a hunting culture tradition. So that there are historical as well as psychological aspects of this problem.

BILL MOYERS: In all of these stories there is someone dying, a hero dying, in order for life to appear again. What does that say to you?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Let me tell you one story here. This isn’t a story, this is a ritual. It’s in New Guinea, and it’s associated with the men’s societies in New Guinea, and they are horror societies, because they really enact the myth of death and resurrection and cannibalistic consumption. And you have the myth there of the buried body and the life coming out of it, you know, this is the basic myth. Now we’re going to enact it.

So here’s this sacred field, the drums going and chants going and then pauses, and this went on for three or four or five days, on and on. And rituals are boring, they just wear you out, you know, and then you break through to something else. Then comes the great moment: the young boys who were being initiated into manhood were now to have their first sexual experience. There was a great shed of enormous logs, supported by two uprights over here, and the young woman comes in, all ornamented as a deity, and she is brought to lie down in this place, beneath the great roof. And the boys then, with the drums going and chanting going on, one after another, there are about six boys, have their first permitted or public intercourse with the girl. And when the last boy is with her in full embrace, the supports are withdrawn, the logs drop, and the couple are killed.

There is the union of male and female again as they were in the beginning before the separation took place, there is the union of begetting, and death again, and they’re both the same thing. The little pair are pulled out and roasted and eaten right that evening, enacting the myth in its essential character. You can’t beat that.

BILL MOYERS: And the truth to which there…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s the sacrifice of the mass. One of the wonderful things in the Catholic ritual is going to communion. There you’re taught that this is the body and blood of the Saviour, and you take it to you and you turn inward, and there he’s working within you.

BILL MOYERS: The truth to which the ritual points is?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The nature of life itself had to be realized in the acts of life. When in the hunting cultures a sacrifice is made, it is as it were a gift, a bribe, as it were, to the deity that is being invited to do something for us, or to give us something. When a figure is sacrificed in the planting culture, that figure is the god. The person who died, was buried and became the food is Christ crucified, from whose body the food of the spirit comes. There is a sublimation of what originally was a very solid vegetal image. He is on Holy Rood, the tree. He is himself the fruit of the tree. Jesus is the fruit of eternal life which was on the second tree in the garden of Eden.

When man had eaten of the fruit of the first tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he is said to have been expelled from the garden. He had already expelled himself from the garden. The garden is the place of unity, nonduality, nonduality of male and female, nonduality of man and God, nonduality of good and evil. You eat the duality, and you’re on the way out. So this tree of the nonduality, is the tree of the exit.

Now, the tree of coming back to the garden is the tree of immortal life. Where you know that “I and the father are one.” And the two that seem to become one again. And this is exactly the tree under which the Buddha sits.

BILL MOYERS: The tree of wisdom?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The tree of immortal life, of the knowledge of immortal life. And the Buddha under his tree, and Christ hanging on his tree are the same image. They are the same image. The one who has died to the flesh and been reborn in the spirit. This is an essential experience of any mystical realization; you die to your flesh and are born to your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle. You die to the vehicle and become identified in your consciousness with that of which the vehicle is the carrier, do you understand me? And that is the god.

So that what you get in the vegetation traditions is this notion of identity behind the surface display of duality, identity behind it all. All of these are manifestations of the One. The one radiance shines through all things. The function of art, in a way, is to reveal through the object here the radiance, and that’s what you get when you see the beautiful organization of a fortunately composed work of art. You just say, aha. Somehow it speaks to the order in your own life. ‘This is a realization through art of the very thing that the religions are concerned to render.

BILL MOYERS: That death is life and life is death, and that the two are in accord.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: You have to have a balance between death and life. They’re two aspects of the same thing, which is being/becoming.

BILL MOYERS: And that’s in all of these stories?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All of them. I don’t know one where death is rejected.

BILL MOYERS: This idea of sacrifice is so foreign to our world today.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the old idea of being sacrificed is not what we think at all.

BILL MOYERS: No?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Just consider: I think the great model of sacrifice is the Mayan Indian ball game. You know they had a kind of basketball game, there’s a loop there up in the stadium wall, and the idea was to get this big heavy ball through that. I don’t know how they did it, with their shoulders or heads or something or other. And the captain of the winning team was sacrificed on the field by the captain of the losing team, his head was cut off. And going to your sacrifice as the winning stroke of your life is the essence of the early sacrificial idea.

There’s a wonderful story that I found in the Jesuit relations, you know, the Jesuits here in the 17th century as missionaries up in Canada and northern New York state and so forth, of a young Iroquois boy who had just been captured by the Hurons or perhaps it was the other way around, I’ve forgotten. And he was being brought to be tortured to death. The Northeast Indians engaged in a systematic torture, which would go on for a long time, and the ordeal was to be sustained with a smile, without flinching, that was it. That was real manhood.

But the boy is brought to this as though he were being brought to his wedding. He is singing, and the people with him are treating him as though they were his hosts and he was the honored guest. And he played the game with them, knowing where he was going. And the priests describing the thing are absolutely bewildered by the situation, and they say that the mockery of this kind of hospitality for people who are then going to be become the brutes. No, those people were the priests! And this was the sacrifice of the altar, and that boy was Jesus, you know, by analogy. And the priest every day is celebrating mass, which is an imitation or repetition actually of the sacrifice of the cross. That’s what this priest was witnessing.

But then you have it also, in John, in the Acts of John: Jesus, before going to crucify the Jesus dance, that’s one of the most beautiful passages in the Christian tradition. In the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John gospels, it’s certainly mentioned that we sang a hymn and Jesus went forth. Well, here you have the whole hymn described: in a ring, Jesus in the center, saying, ‘join hands and we’ll sing and we’ll dance,’ and he says, ‘I am this, I am that, I am so forth and so forth, amen, amen.’ Oh, my God, it’s grand. And then he walks out to be crucified. When you go to your death that way as a god, you are going to your eternal life. What’s sad about that? Let’s make it great And they do.

BILL MOYERS: The god of death is the lord of the dance.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The god of death is the lord of sex at the same time.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It’s a marvelous thing. One after another, you can see these gods Ghede, the death god of the Haitian voodoo, is also the sex god. Wotan had one eye covered and the other uncovered, do you see, and at the same time was the lord of life. Osiris, the lord of death and the lord of the generation of life. It’s a basic theme: that which dies is born. You have to have death in order to have life.

Now, this is the origin thought really of the head hunt, in Southeast Asia and particularly in the Indonesian zone. The head hunt, right up to now, has been a sacred act, it’s a sacred killing: Unless there is death, there cannot be birth, and a young man, before he can be permitted to marry and become a father, must have gone forth and had his kill.

BILL MOYERS: What does that say to you?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, that every generation has to die in order that the next generation should come. As soon as you beget or give birth to a child, you are the dead one; the child is the new life and you are simply the protector of that new life.

BILL MOYERS: Your time has come and you know it.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah, well, that’s why there is this deep psychological association of begetting and dying.

BILL MOYERS: Isn’t there some relationship between what you’re saying and this fact, that a father will give his life for his son, a mother will give her life for her child?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: There’s a wonderful paper. I don’t whether you knew it that I would love to talk to this point there’s a wonderful paper by Schopenhauer, who’s one of my three favorite philosophers, called “The Foundation of Morality.” There he asks exactly the question that you’ve asked. How is it that a human being can so participate in the peril or pain of another, that without thought, spontaneously, he sacrifices his own life to the other? How can this happen? That what we normally think of as the first law of nature, namely self-preservation, is suddenly dissolved, there’s a breakthrough.

In Hawaii, some four or five years ago, there was an extraordinary adventure that represents this problem. There’s a place there called the Pali, where the winds from the north, the trade winds from the north, come breaking through a great ridge of rocks and of mountain, and they come through with a great blast of wind. The people like to go up there to get their hair blown around and so forth, or to commit suicide, you know, like jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Well, a police car was on its way up early, a little road that used to go up there, and they saw just beyond the railing that keeps cars from rolling over, a young man actually clearly about to jump and prepare himself to jump. The police car stopped. The policeman on the right jumps out to grab the boy, and grabs him just as he jumped and was himself being pulled over, and would have gone over if the second cop hadn’t gotten around, grabbed him and pull the two of them back. There was a long description of this, it was a marvelous thing, in the newspapers at that time.

And the policeman was asked, “Why didn’t you let go? I mean, you would have lost your life?” And you see what had happened to that man, this is what’s known as one pointed meditation everything else in his life dropped off. His duty to his family, his duty to his job, his duty to his own career, all of his wishes and hopes for life, just disappeared and he was about to go. And his answer was, “I couldn’t let go. If I had,” and I’m quoting almost word for word, “if I’d let that young man go, I could not have lived another day of my life.”

How come? Schopenhauer’s answer is, this is the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization that you and the other are one. And that the separateness is only an effect of the temporal forms of sensibility of time and space. And a true reality is in that unity with all life. It is a metaphysical truth that becomes spontaneously realized, because it’s the real truth of your life. Now, you might say the hero is the one who has given his physical life, you might say, to some order of realization of that truth. It may appear that I’m one with my tribe, or I’m one with people of a certain kind, or I’m one with life. This is not a concept; this is a realization, do you see what I mean?

BILL MOYERS: No, explain it.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And the concepts of love your neighbor and all are to put you in tune with that fact, but whether you love your neighbor or not, bing, the thing grabs you and you do this thing. You don’t even know who it is. That policeman didn’t know who that young man was. And Schopenhauer says in small ways you can see this happening every day all the time. This is a theme that can be seen moving life in the world, people doing nice things for each other.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think has happened to this mythic idea of the hero in our culture today?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It comes up in an experience. I think, I remember during the Vietnam war, seeing on the television the young men in helicopters going out to rescue one of their companions at great risk to themselves. They didn’t have to rescue that young man; that’s the same thing working. It puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. Going to the office every day, you don’t get that experience, but suddenly you’re ripped out into being alive. And life is pain and life is suffering and life is horror, but by God, you’re alive and it’s spectacular. And this is a case of being alive, rescuing that young man.

BILL MOYERS: But I also know a man who said once, after years of standing on the platform of the subway, “I die a little bit down there every day, but I know I’m doing so for my family.” There are small acts of heroism that occur without regard to the nobility or the notoriety that you attract for it.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s right, that’s right.

BILL MOYERS: And the mother does it by the isolation she endures in behalf of the family, of raising…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Motherhood is a sacrifice. On our veranda in Hawaii, there are little birds that come that Jean likes to feed. And each year there have been one or two mothers, mother birds. And if you’ve ever seen a mother bird plagued by her progeny for food, that the mother should regurgitate their meal to them, and the two of them, or five of them in one case, flopping all over this poor little mother, they bigger than she in some cases, you just think, well, this is the symbol of motherhood. This is just giving of your substance, every thing, to this progeny.

There should be it in marriage. A marriage is a relationship. When you make a sacrifice in marriage, you’re not sacrificing to the other, you’re sacrificing to the relationship. And this is symbolized, for example, in that Chinese image of the tai chi, the tao, you know, with the dark and the light interacting, it’s a well-known sign. That is the relationship of yang and yin, male and female, which is what a marriage is. And that’s what you are, you’re no longer this, you’re the relationship. And so marriage, I would say, is not a love affair, it’s an ordeal.

BILL MOYERS: An ordeal?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The ordeal is sacrifice of ego to the relationship, of a two-ness which now becomes the one.

BILL MOYERS: One not only biologically but spiritually, and primarily spiritually.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Primarily spiritually.

BILL MOYERS: But the necessary function of marriage, in order to create our own images and perpetuate ourselves in children, but it’s not the primary one, as you say.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: No, that’s really just the elementary aspect of marriage. There are two completely different stages of marriage. First is the youthful marriage, following the wonderful impulse, you know, that nature has given us, in the interplay of the sexes biologically. And in the reproduction of children. But there comes a time when the child graduates from the family, and the family is left. I’ve been amazed at the number of my friends who in their forties or fifties go apart, who have had a perfectly decent life together with the child, but they interpreted their union in terms of relationship through the child. They did not interpret it in terms of their own personal relationship to each other.

BILL MOYERS: Utterly incompatible with the idea of doing one’s own thing?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It’s not one’s own thing, you see. It is in a sense one’s own thing, but the one isn’t just you, it’s the two together. And that’s a purely mythological image, of the sacrifice of the visible entity for a transcendent unit, cracking eggs to make an omelet, you know? And by marrying the right person, we reconstruct the image of the incarnate god, and that’s what marriage is.

BILL MOYERS: The right person. How does one choose the right person?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Your heart tells you; it ought to.

BILL MOYERS: Your inner being.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s the mystery.

BILL MOYERS: You recognize your other self.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I don’t know, but there’s a flash that comes and something in you knows that this is the one.

BILL MOYERS: What has mythology told you about death? What do you think about death?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the way, if one can identify with the consciousness of which the body is a vehicle, and really achieve an identification with the consciousness of which the body is a vehicle, not knowing what it is, undifferentiated consciousness, one can let the body go. I like what I heard of Woody Allen, you know, “I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” You can have disengaged yourself from the body, and not be there, you might say.

BILL MOYERS: And yet you know from myth and nature that the body dies. It perishes, it rots we’re back to the beginning of the…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: So you expect it. Growing old, I mean. You know what’s happening. The body is rotting, it’s dying, it’s losing its energy, there’s more mass than energy here. And the identification then with the life which in a plant survives pruning, cutting and even eating. The plant is right back there again, is as you might say, a biological image that is metaphorical of the spiritual mystery.

BILL MOYERS: There’s the wonderful report of the Indians riding into the rain of bullets from Custer’s men, and they’re saying, “It’s a good day to die.”

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: “It’s a great day to die.” They’re not hanging on. That’s the message of the myth. You as you know yourself are not the final term of your being. And you must die to that, one way or another, in giving of yourself to something, or in being annihilated actually physically, to return, you might say, or to recognize. Life is always on the edge of death, always, and one should lack fear and have the courage of life. That’s the principle initiation of all of the heroic stories.

BILL MOYERS: What’s the central story? Do you have a story that’s central to this?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Green Knight, Arthur’s court is in session, and there rides into the court on a great big green horse a giant knight. And the knight says. “I have a challenge. I have an adventure. I challenge anyone here to come down here and take this great big ax and cut my head off and then one year from today, meet me at a green chapel,” and he tells them roughly where the green chapel is, “and I’ll cut his head off.” And the only knight who had the courage to accept this curious invitation was Gawain. And the knight gets off his horse, sticks out his neck, Gawain comes down with his axe, and there’s the head. And then the knight stands up, picks up the head, gets on the horse and rides off, says. “I’ll see you in a year.”

Well, that year everybody was very generous to Gawain, and he rides off for the year. As the day approaches, he finds himself before a little hunter’s cabin, and he thinks he’ll ask advice here as to where the green chapel is, and tells them, “I’ve got to be there in three days.” Then the hunter greets him and Gawain tells his story, and the hunter says, “Well, the green chapel, it’s just down the way here. It’s about a couple of hundred yards. And why don’t you just spend the next three days with us, and we’ll entertain you, and then you can go to this adventure.” “All right, very well.” So the hunter says. “Well, I’ve got to go out for the day on the hunt,” and he says, “you’ll spend the night with us, and then in the morning I’ll go forth and in the evening I’ll come back and I’ll give everything I will have got during the day to you, and you give to me what you will have got during the day.”

Well, in the morning the hunter rides off, and Gawain’s in bed, and in comes the hunter’s gorgeous, beautiful wife. And she tickles Gawain’s chin and invites him to love. Well, he’s an Arthurian knight, a knight of Arthur’s court, and to betray his host is the last thing that a knight can submit to, so he resists this woman. And she’s very, very aggressive, and he’s very, very stern in his position, and finally she says, “Well, let me give you a kiss, anyhow.” So she gives him one big smack, and that’s that. In the evening the hunter comes back with a great haul of game, throws it on the floor, and Gawain gives him a kiss, and they laugh, and that’s that.

Second morning, a similar event, the wife comes in and Gawain gets two kisses. And the hunter comes back with about half as much game and he gets two kisses, and they laugh, and that’s that.

The third morning, the wife comes in, and now here’s a man about to meet his death. He’s about to have his head chopped off, a beautiful woman, the last moment, I mean, of the possibility of this one fulfillment, and again he resists. She gives him three kisses and her garter. And she says, “This will protect you against any danger.” The hunter comes home with just one silly smelly fox, throws it on the ground, and he gets three kisses but no garter.

So comes the time now to go and have your head chopped off. Do you see what the tests are of the knight here? One is sex, you know, lust, and the other is courage. So he approaches the chapel, the green chapel, with the Green Knight whom he’s about to encounter, and he hears the knight whetting this great knife, this great ax, whew-whew-whew-whew, and he comes to it. And the knight is there, certainly, the great big green fellow, and he greets him. And says, “Okay, put your neck out there on this block, and I’ll chop your head off.” And he lifts the ax, and he says, “No, stretch out a little more.” He does this three times. And then the ax comes down and whew just cuts his neck a little bit. And the Green Knight says, “That’s for the garter.”

Well, this is the original legend of the Knights of the Garter. Here’s a knight who really transcended the two great temptations, fear of death and lust for sex and the joys of life.

BILL MOYERS: And the moral?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And the moral is that the realization of your bliss, your true being, comes when you have put aside the, what might be called passing moment, with its terror and with its temptations and its statement of requirements of life, that you should live this way.

BILL MOYERS: What is that story about and I forget where it comes from about the camel and then the lion, and along the way you lose the burden of youth?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The three transformations of the spirit. That’s Nietzsche. That’s the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

BILL MOYERS: Tell me that story.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: When you are a child, when you are young and a young person, you are a camel. The camel gets down on its knees and says, “Put a load on me.” This is obedience. This is receiving the instruction, information that your society knows you must have in order to live a competent life. When the camel is well loaded, he gets up on his feet, struggles to his feet, and runs out into the desert, where he becomes transformed into a lion. The heavier the load, the more powerful the lion. The function of the lion is to kill a dragon, and the name of the dragon is “Thou Shalt.” And on every scale of the dragon there is a “Thou Shalt” imprinted. Some of it comes from 2,000 years, 4,000 years ago. Some of it comes from yesterday morning’s newspaper headline. When the dragon is killed, the lion is transformed into a child, an innocent child living out of its own dynamic. And Nietzsche uses the term, ein aus sich rollendes Rad, a wheel rolling out of its own center. That’s what you become. That is the mature individual.

The “Thou Shalt” is the civilizing force, it turns a human animal into a civilized human being. But the one who has thrown off the “Thou Shalts” is still a civilized human being. Do you see? He has been humanized, you might say, by the “Thou Shalt” system, so his performance now as a child is not simply childlike at all. He has assimilated the culture and thrown it off as a “Thou Shalt.” But this is the way in any art work. You go to work and study an art. You study the techniques, you study all the rules, and the rules are put upon you by a teacher. Then there comes a time of using the rules, not being used by them. Do you understand what I’m saying? And one way is to follow…and I always tell my students, follow your bliss.

BILL MOYERS: Follow your bliss?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Your bliss, where the deep of sense of being in form and going where your body and soul want to go, when you have that feeling, then stay with it and don’t let anyone throw you off. Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt?

BILL MOYERS: Not in a long time.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Do you remember the last line? “I’ve never done a thing I wanted to in all my life.”

BILL MOYERS: Quite an admission.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s the man who never followed his bliss. Well, I heard that line. 

I was living in Bronxville when I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence. Before I was married, I used to be eating out in the restaurants of the town for my lunch and dinners. 

And Thursday night was the maid’s night off in Bronxville, so that all the families were out in the restaurants. And one fine evening, I was in my favorite restaurant there. It was a Greek restaurant. And at a table was sitting A Father, A mother, and a scrawny little boy here, about 12 years old. 

And The Father says to The Boy, 

“Drink Your Tomato Juice.” 

And The Boy says, “I Don’t Want to.” 

And The Father with a louder voice says, 

“Drink Your Tomato Juice.” 

And The Mother says, “Don’t make him 

Do What he Doesn’t want to Do.” 

The Father looks at her, and he says, 

“He can’t go through Life Doing What he Wants to Do.” 

Said, “If he Does only What He wants to Do, 

He’ll be Dead -- Look at Me, 

I’ve never Done a Thing I wanted to in All My Life.” 

I said, My God, Babbitt incarnate. 

And that’s the man who never followed his bliss.

Well, You may have a Success in Life, but then just think of it, what kind of life was it, what good is it? You’ve never done a thing you wanted to in all your life.

BILL MOYERS: What happens when you follow your bliss?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: You come to Bliss. This should be it in Marriage. I mean, that’s the sense of The Marriage Ceremony. In the Middle Ages, a favourite image that occurs in many, many contexts is The Wheel of Fortune. There’s The Hub of The Wheel, and there’s the revolving Rim of The wheel. And if You attached to The Rim of The Wheel, let’s say Fortune, You will be either above, going down, at The Bottom, or coming up. 

But if You are at The Hub, You’re in The Same Place all the time. And that’s the sense of The Marriage Vow, you know. I Take You in Health or Sickness, you know, in Wealth or Poverty, but I Take You and You are My Bliss, riot the wealth that you might bring me, nor the social prestige, but You. And that’s Following Your Bliss.

I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit which is the great spiritual language of the world, and they know all about it and have known about it for a long time, the transcendent is transcendent. But there are three terms that bring you to the brink, you might say the jumping off place to the ocean. And the three terms are sat, chit, ananda. And sat, the word sat means “being.” Chit means “full consciousness.” And ananda means “rapture.” So I thought, I don’t know whether my consciousness is full consciousness or not, I don’t know whether my being is proper being or not, but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture and that’ll bring me both being and full consciousness, and it worked.

BILL MOYERS: What was your rapture?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, it started with Indians, and then it went on into more and more mythological matters and the realm of the arts, music, and when I met Jean, then the dance came in, and this is it, just stay with that.

BILL MOYERS: And one doesn’t have to be a poet to do this, carpenters do it, farmers do it.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: A Poet is simply one who’s made a profession and a lifestyle of being in Touch with that. Most people have to be concerned with other things. They get themselves involved in economic and other activities, or you’re drafted into a War that isn’t the one you’re interested in, and how to hold to this umbilical, you might say, under those circumstances? That’s a technique each one has to work out for himself somehow. But most people living in that realm of what might be called 'occasional concerns', they all have the capacity that’s waiting to be awakened, to move to this other place. I Know it, I’ve seen it happen in students. A wonderful way of teaching we have at Sarah Lawrence, where I taught for 38 years, I’d have an individual conference with every one of my students at least once a fortnight for half an hour or so. And there you’re talking on about the things that students ought to be reading, and suddenly you hit on something that the student really responds to. You could see the eyes open, the complexion changes, a life possibility has opened there. And all you can say to yourself is, I hope this child hangs onto that, you know. They may or may not, but when they do, they’ve found a life right there in the room with you.

BILL MOYERS: How would you advise somebody to tap that spring of eternal life, that joy, that is right there?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, we’re having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your joy is. Grab it; no one can tell you what it’s going to be. I mean, you’ve got to learn to recognize your own depths.

BILL MOYERS: Do you ever have this sense, when you’re following your bliss, as I have at moments, of being helped by hidden hands?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All the time. It’s miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time. Namely, that if you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you’re living somehow. And well, you can see it. You begin to deal with people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss, and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

BILL MOYERS: Do you ever have sympathy for the man who has no invisible means of support?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Who has no invisible means yes, he’s the one that evokes compassion, you know, the poor chap. And to see him stumbling around, when the water of immortal life is right there, is really evokes one’s pity.

BILL MOYERS: Right there? Right there? You believe that?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes, yes.

BILL MOYERS: The waters of eternal life?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Right there.

BILL MOYERS: Where?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Wherever you are if you’re following your bliss. I mean, you’re having that joy, that refreshment, that life, all the time.