That’s the basic idea, that through the ritual, that dimension is struck
which transcends temporality and out of which
life comes and back into which it goes.
BILL MOYERS:
And it goes back to this whole idea of death, burial
and resurrection, not only for human beings, but for…
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
But for the animals, too.
BILL MOYERS:
So the story of the buffalo’s wife
was told to confirm the reverence.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
That’s right.
BILL MOYERS:
What happened when the white man came
and slaughtered this animal of reverence?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
That was a sacramental violation.
I mean, in the eighties, when the buffalo hunt
was undertaken, you know, with Kit Carson…
BILL MOYERS:
The 1880s, a hundred years ago.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
— and Buffalo Bill and so forth.
When I was a boy, whenever we went
for sleigh rides we had a buffalo robe.
Buffalo, buffalo, buffalo robes all over the place.
This was the sacred animal to The Indians.
These hunters go out with repeating rifles,
and then shoot down the whole herd
and leave it there.
Take the skin to sell and the body’s left to rot.
This is a sacrilege, and it really is a sacrilege.
BILL MOYERS:
It turned the buffalo from a “Thou-”
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
To an “it.”
BILL MOYERS:
The Indians addressed the buffalo as “Thou.”
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
As a “Thou”.
BILL MOYERS:
As an object of reverence.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
The Indians addressed Life as a “Thou,”
I mean, trees and stones, everything else.
You can address anything as a “Thou”,
and you can feel the change in your psychology as you do it.
The ego that sees a “Thou” is not the same ego that sees an “it.”
Your whole psychology changes
when you address things as an “it.”
And when you go to war with a people,
the problem of the newspapers
is to turn those people into its,
so that they’re not “Thous.”
BILL MOYERS:
That was an incredible moment in
The Evolution of American Society,
when the buffalo were slaughtered.
That was the final exclamation point
behind the destruction
of the Indian civilization,
because you were destroying…
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Can you imagine what the experience must have been
for a people within 10 years to lose their environment,
to lose their food supply, to lose the object of the…
the central object of their ritual life?
BILL MOYERS:
So it is in your belief that it was in this period of hunting man and woman,
the time of hunting man, that human beings begin to sense
a stirring of the mythic imagination, the wonder of things that they didn’t know.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
There is this burst of magnificent art and
all the evidence you need of
a mythic imagination in full career.
BILL MOYERS:
You visited some of the great painted caves in Europe.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Oh, yes.
BILL MOYERS:
Tell me what you remember when first you looked upon those underground caves.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Well, you didn’t want to leave.
Here you come into an enormous chamber, like a great cathedral,
with these animals painted.
And they’re painted with a life like the life of an ink on silk,
the Japanese painting. And well, you realize the darkness is inconceivable.
We’re there with electric lights, but in a couple of instances,
the concierge, the man who was showing us through,
turned off the lights and you were never in darker darkness in your life.
It’s like a, I don’t know, just a complete knockout of,
you don’t know where you are, whether
you’re looking north, south, east or west.
All orientation is gone, and you’re in a darkness that never saw the sun.
Then they tum the lights on again,
and you see these gloriously painted animals.
A bull that will be 20 feet long, and painted so that the haunches
will be represented by a swelling in the rock, you know,
they take account of the whole thing. It’s incredible.
BILL MOYERS:
Do you ever look at these primitive art objects,
and think not of the art but of the man or woman
standing there, painting or creating?
I find that’s where I speculate.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Oh, this is what hits you when you go into those caves, I can tell you that.
What was in their mind when they were doing that?
And that’s not an easy thing to do.
And how did they get up there?
And how did they see anything?
And what kind of light did they have the little flashing torches
throwing flickering things on it, to get something of that grace and perfection?
And with respect to the problem of beauty,
is this beauty intended, or is this something
that is the natural expression of a beautiful spirit.
You know what I mean?
When you hear a bird sing, the beauty of the bird’s song,
is this intentional, in what sense is it intentional?
But it’s the expression of the bird, the beauty of the bird’s spirit,
you might almost say, and I think that way very often about this art.
To what degree was the intention of the artist,
what we would call “aesthetic,”
or to what degree expressive, you know,
and to what degree something that
they simply had learned to do that way?
It’s a difficult point. When a spider makes a beautiful web,
the beauty comes out of the spider’s nature, you know,
it’s instinctive beauty.
And how much of the beauty of our own lives
is the beauty of being alive, and how much of it
is conscious intention? That’s a big question.
BILL MOYERS:
You call them temple caves.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Yes.
BILL MOYERS:
Why temple?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Temple with images and stained glass windows, cathedrals, are a landscape of the soul.
You move into a world of spiritual images, that’s what this is.
When Eilean and I, my wife and I, drove down from Paris
to this part of France, we stopped off at Chartres Cathedral.
There is a cathedral. When you walk into the cathedral,
it’s the mother, womb of your spiritual life Mother church --
All the forms around are significant of spiritual values,
and the imagery is in anthropomorphic form God and Jesus
and the saints and all, in human form.
BILL MOYERS:
In Human form.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Then we went down to the Lascaux.
The images were in animal form.
The form is secondary;
The Message is what’s important
BILL MOYERS:
And The Message of The Cave?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
The Message of The Cave is of a relationship
of time to eternal powers that is
somehow to be experienced
in that place.
Now, I tell you, when you’re down in those caves,
it’s a strange transformation of consciousness you have.
You feel this is the womb, this is the place from which life comes,
and that world up there in the sun with all those …
That’s a secondary world: this is primary.
I mean, this just overcomes you.
BILL MOYERS:
You had that feeling when you were there?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
I had it every time. Now, what were
these caves used for?
The speculations that are most common of scholars interested in this,
is that they had to do with The Initiation of Boys into The Hunt.
You go in there, it’s dangerous, it’s very dangerous.
It’s completely dark. It’s cold and dank.
You’re banging your head on projections all the time,
and it was a place of Fear.
And the boys were to overcome all that,
and go into the womb of the earth.
And The Shaman, or whoever it was
that would be helping you through,
would not be making it easy.
BILL MOYERS:
And then there was a release, once you got into that vast,
torchlit chamber down there.
What was The Tribe, what was The Tradition
trying to say to the boy?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
That is the womb land from which
all the animals come.
BILL MOYERS:
I see.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
And the rituals down there have to do with the generation of a situation that will be propitious for the hunt. And the boys were to learn not only to hunt, but how to respect the animals and what rituals to perform, and how in their own lives no longer to be little boys but to be men. Because those hunts were very, very dangerous hunts, believe me, and these are the Original men’s rile sanctuaries, when:
the boys became no longer their mothers’ sons, but their fathers’ sons.
BILL MOYERS:
Don’t you wonder what effect this had on a boy?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Well, you can go through it today, actually,
in cultures that are still having
the initiations with young boys.
They give them an ordeal, a terrifying ordeal,
that the youngster has to survive,
makes a man of him, you know.
BILL MOYERS:
What would happen to me as A Child,
if I went through one of these rites,
as far as we can…
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Well, we know what they do in Australia.
Now, when A Boy gets to be, you know,
a little bit ungovernable, one fine day
The Men come in, and they’re naked
except for stripes of white down
that has been stuck on their bodies,
and stripes with their men’s blood.
They used their own blood
for gluing this on.
And they’re swinging the bull-roarers,
which are The Voice of The Spirits,
and they come as spirits.
The Boy will try to take refuge with His Mother;
she’ll pretend to try to protect him.
The Men just take him away,
A Mother’s no good from then on,
you see, he’s no longer a little boy.
He’s in The Men’s Group,
and then they put him really
through an ordeal.
These are The Rites, you know,
of circumcision, subincision,
and so forth.
BILL MOYERS:
And the whole purpose is to…
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Turn him into a member
of The Tribe.
BILL MOYERS:
And A Hunter
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
And A Hunter.
BILL MOYERS:
Because that was
the way of life.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Yeah, but most important is to live
according to the needs and
values of that tribe.
He is initiated in a Short period of time
into the whole culture context of His People.
BILL MOYERS:
So myth relates directly
to ceremony and tribal ritual,
and the absence of myth can
mean the end of ritual.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
A ritual is the enactment of a myth.
By participating in a ritual, you are participating in a myth.
BILL MOYERS:
And what does it mean, do you think,
to young boys today, that we are
absent these myths?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Well, the confirmation ritual is the counterpart today of these rites.
As a little Catholic boy, you choose your confirmed name,
the name you’re going to be confirmed by, and you go up.
But instead of having them scarify you,
knock your teeth out and all,
the bishop gives you a
mild slap on the cheek.
It’s been reduced to that,
and nothing’s happened to you.
The Jewish counterpart is the bar mitzvah,
and whether it works actually to
effect a psychological transformation,
I suppose, will depend on the individual case.
There was no problem in these old days.
The boy came out with a different body,
and he’d gone through something.
