BILL MOYERS: Speaking of different mythologies, let’s just have a little fun here.
I took these from your atlas.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Oh, yes.
BILL MOYERS: I’ll read from Genesis, and then you identify and read from the corresponding …
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Oh, yes.
BILL MOYERS: Genesis 1: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them. Then God blessed them and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And now this is from a legend of the Bassari people of West Africa. “Unumbotte made a human being, its name was Man. Unumbotte next made all antelope, named Antelope. Unumbotte made a snake, named Snake. And Unumbotte said to them, ‘The earth has not yet been pounded. You must pound the ground smooth where you are sitting.’ Unumbone gave them seeds of all kinds and said, ‘Go plant these.'”
BILL MOYERS: And Genesis 1: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.”
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And from the Upanishad: “Then he realized, I indeed am this creation, for I have poured it forth from myself. In that way he became this creation, and verily he who knows this becomes in this creation a creator.” That’s the clincher there. When you know this, then you’ve identified with the creative principle yourself, which is the God-power in the world, which means in you. It’s beautiful.
BILL MOYERS: What do you think we’re looking for, when we subscribe to one of these theories of creation, one of these stories of creation? What are we looking for?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I think what we’re looking for is a way of experiencing the world in which we are living, that will open to us the transcendence that informs it, and at the same time informs ourselves within it. That’s what people want, that’s what the soul asks for.
BILL MOYERS: You mean we’re looking for some accord with the mystery that informs all things, what you call that vast ground of silence which we all share?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes, but not only to find it, but to find it actually in our environment, in our world, to recognize it, to have some kind of instruction that will enable us to see the divine presence.
BILL MOYERS: In the world and in us.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: In India, this wonderful Anjali, this greeting, you know what that means?
BILL MOYERS: No.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s the greeting of prayer, isn’t it? That’s what we use for prayer. They greet you with that, that’s greeting the god that’s in you as you come in. These people are aware of the divine presence. When you enter an Indian home as a guest, you are a visiting deity, and you feel it, by God, the way they treat you. It’s something in the way of a hospitality that you don’t get where you have simply one person and another person. It’s a recognition of the identity.
BILL MOYERS: But weren’t people who told these stories and believed them and acted on them asking far more simple questions, you know, who made the world, how was the world made, why was the world made? Aren’t these the questions that these creation stories are trying to address?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: No. It’s through that answer that they see that the creator is present in the whole world. Do you see what I mean? This story that we’ve just read, “I see that I am this creation,” says the god. When you see that God says he is the creation and then you are a creature, well, the god is within you and the man you’re talking to, also. And so there’s that realization, two aspects of the one divinity.
BILL MOYERS: Accord again, harmony again.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Wonderful thing.
BILL MOYERS: Let me ask you some questions about these common features in these stories, the significance of the forbidden fruit.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, there’s a standard folktale motif called “The One Forbidden Thing.” Remember, in Bluebeard, “Don’t open that closet.” You know, and then one always does it. And in the Old Testament story, God gives the one forbidden thing, and he knows very well, now I’m interpreting God, he knows very well that man’s going to eat the forbidden fruit. But it’s by doing that that man becomes the initiator of his own life. Life really begins with that.
BILL MOYERS: I also find in some of these early stories, the human tendency to find someone to blame.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: Let me read Genesis 1, then I’ll ask you to read one from the Bassari legend.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All right.
BILL MOYERS: Genesis 1: “And God said, ‘Have you eaten from the tree which I commanded you that you should not eat?’ Then the man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I ate.’ And the Lord God said to the woman, What is this you’ve done?’ And the woman said, ‘The serpent deceived me, and I ate.’ Now, I mean, you talk about buck-passing, it starts very early.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s right.
BILL MOYERS: And then there’s the Bassari legend.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It’s been tough on serpents, too. “One day Snake said, ‘We too should eat these fruits. Why must we go hungry?’ Antelope said, ‘But we don’t know anything about this fruit.’ Then Man and his wife took some of the fruit and ate it. Unumbotte came down from the sky and asked, ‘Who ate the fruit?’ They answered, ‘We did.’ Unumbotte asked, ‘Who told you that you could eat that fruit?’ They replied, ‘Snake did.’ It’s the same story.
BILL MOYERS: Poor Snake.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It’s the same story.
BILL MOYERS: What do you make of this, that in all of these stories the principal actors are pointing to someone else as the initiator of the fall?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah, but it turns out to be Snake. And Snake in both of these stories is the symbol of life throwing off the past and continuing to live.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
“Let me tell you what happens to me when I read these stories, no matter the culture of their origin. I feel first this sense of wonder at the spectacle of the human imagination, simply groping to try to understand this existence.” — Bill Moyers
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The power of life, because the snake sheds its skin, just as the moon sheds its shadow. The snake in most cultures is positive. Even the most poisonous thing, in India, the cobra, is a sacred animal. And the serpent, Naga, the serpent king, Nagaraga, is the next thing to the Buddha, because the serpent represents the power of life in the field of time to throw off death, and the Buddha represents the power of life in the field of eternity to be eternally alive.
Now, I saw a fantastic thing of a Burmese priestess, a snake priestess, who had to bring rain to her people by calling a king cobra from his den and kissing him three times on the nose. There was the cobra, the giver of life, the giver of rain, which is of life, as the divine positive, not negative, figure.
BILL MOYERS: The Christian stories turn it around, because the serpent was the seducer.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, what that amounts to is a refusal to affirm life. Life is evil in this view. Every natural impulse is sinful unless you’ve been baptized or circumcised, in this tradition that we’ve inherited. For heaven’s sakes!
BILL MOYERS: By having been the tempter, women have paid a great price, because in mythology, some of this mythology, they are the ones who led to the downfall.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Of course they did. I mean, they represent life. Man doesn’t enter life except by woman, and so it is woman who brings us into the world of polarities and pair of opposites and suffering and all. But I think it’s a really childish attitude, to say “no” to life with all its pain, you know, to say this is something that should not have been.
Schopenhauer, in one of his marvelous chapters, I think it’s in The World as Will and Idea, says: “Life is something that should not have been. It is in its very essence and character, a terrible thing to consider, this business of living by killing and eating.” I mean, it’s in sin in terms of all ethical judgments all the time.
BILL MOYERS: As Zorba says, you know, “Trouble? Life is trouble. Only death is no trouble.”
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s it. And when people say to me, you know, do you have optimism about the world, you know, how terrible it is, I said, yes, just say, “It’s great!” Just the way it is.
BILL MOYERS: But doesn’t that lead to a rather passive attitude in the face of evil, in the face of wrong?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: You participate in it. Whatever you do is evil for somebody.
BILL MOYERS: But explain that for the audience.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, when I was in India, there was a man whose name was Sri Krishnamenon and his mystical name was Atmananda and he was in Trivandrum, and I went to Trivandrum, and I had the wonderful privilege of sitting face to face with him as I’m sitting here with you. And the first question, first thing he said to me is, “Do you have a question?” Because the teacher there always answers questions, he doesn’t tell you what anything, he answers. And I said, “Yes, I have a question.” I said, “Since in Hindu thinking all the universe is divine, is a manifestation of divinity itself, how can we say ‘no’ to anything in the world, how can we say ‘no’ to brutality, to stupidity, to vulgarity, to thoughtlessness?” And he said, “For you and me, we must say yes.”
Well, I had learned from my friends who were students of his, that that happened to have been the first question he asked his guru, and we had a wonderful talk for about an hour there on this theme, of the affirmation of the world. And it confirmed me in a feeling that I have had, that who are we to judge? And it seems to me that this is one of the great teachings of Jesus.
BILL MOYERS: Well, I see now what you mean in one respect; in some classic Christian doctrine the world is to be despised, life is to be redeemed in the hereafter, it is heaven where our rewards come, and if you affirm that which you deplore, as you say, you’re affirming the world, which is our eternity of the moment.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s what I would say. Eternity isn’t some later time; eternity isn’t a long time; eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking in time cuts out.
BILL MOYERS: This is it.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: This is it.
BILL MOYERS: This is my …
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere, and the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.
There’s a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Boddhisattva. The Bodhisattva, the one whose being, satra, is illumination, bodhi, who realizes his identity with eternity, and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder, and come back and participate in it. “All life is sorrowful,” is the first Buddhist saying, and it is. It wouldn’t be life if there were not temporality involved, which is sorrow, loss, loss, loss.
BILL MOYERS: That’s a pessimistic note.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I mean, you got to say yes to it and say it’s great this way. I mean, this is the way God intended it.
BILL MOYERS: You don’t really believe that?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, this is the way it is, and I don’t believe anybody intended it, but this is the way it is. And Joyce’s wonderful line, you know, “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” And the way to awake from it is not to be afraid and to recognize, as I did in my conversation with that Hindu guru or teacher that I told you of, that all of this as it is, is as it has to be, and it is a manifestation of the eternal presence in the world. The end of things always is painful; pain is part of there being a world at all.
BILL MOYERS: But if one accepted that isn’t the ultimate conclusion, to say, well, ‘I won’t try to reform any laws or fight any battles.’
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I didn’t say that.
BILL MOYERS: Isn’t that the logical conclusion one could draw, though, the philosophy of nihilism?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, that’s not the necessary thing to draw. You could say I will participate in this row, and I will join the army, and I will go to war.
BILL MOYERS: I’ll do the best I can on earth.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I will participate in the game. It’s a wonderful, wonderful opera, except that it hurts. And that wonderful Irish saying, you know, “Is this a private fight, or can anybody get into it?” This is the way life is, and the hero is the one who can participate in it decently, in the way of nature, not in the way of personal rancor, revenge or anything of the kind.
Let me tell you one story here, of a samurai warrior, a Japanese warrior, who had the duty to avenge the murder of his overlord. And he actually, after some time, found and cornered the man who had murdered his overlord. And he was about to deal with him with his samurai sword, when this man in the corner, in the passion of terror, spat in his face. And the samurai sheathed the sword and walked away. Why did he do that?
BILL MOYERS: Why?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Because he was made angry, and if he had killed that man then, it would have a personal act, of another kind of act, that’s not what he had come to do.
BILL MOYERS: Let me tell you what happens to me when I read these stories, no matter the culture of their origin. I feel first this sense of wonder at the spectacle of the human imagination, simply groping to try to understand this existence. Does that ever happen to you?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I tell you, mythology I think of as the homeland of the Muses, the inspirers of poetry. And to see life as a poem, and yourself participating in a poem, is what the myth does for you.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean, a poem?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I mean a vocabulary in the form, not of words, but of acts and adventures, which is connotative, which connotes something transcendent of the action here and which yet informs the whole thing, so that you always feel in accord with the universal being.
BILL MOYERS: Well, the interesting thing to me is, that far from undermining my faith, your work in mythology has liberated my faith from the cultural prisons to which it had been sentenced.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It liberated my own. I know it’s going to do it with everybody who really gets the message. Every mythology, every religion is true in this sense, it is true as metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery. But when it gets stuck to the metaphor, then you’re in trouble.
BILL MOYERS: The metaphor being …
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, Jesus ascended to heaven. The story is, he ascended bodily to heaven. The story is that his mother, still alive, asleep, ascended to heaven. So this is metaphorical of something; you don’t have to throw it away, all you have to find is what it’s saying.
BILL MOYERS: What do you think it is saying?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: What it’s saying is he didn’t go out there, he went in here, which is where you must go, too, and ascend to heaven through the inward space to that source from which you and all life came. That’s the sense of that.
BILL MOYERS: But aren’t you undermining one of the great cardinal doctrines of the tradition of classic Christian faith, the death, of the burial and the resurrection of Jesus prefiguring our own and overcoming the body with a higher physical truth.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, that would be what I would call a mistaken reading of the symbol. That’s reading it in terms of prose instead of in terms of poetry. That’s reading a metaphor in terms of the denotation, instead of in terms of the connotation, do you understand that? A purely literary problem.
BILL MOYERS: The poetry gets to the unseen reality.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That which is beyond even the concept of reality. It’s that which transcends all thought. It’s putting you there all the time, and in some way giving you a line to connect with that mystery which you are, and the myths do it, by gosh, they do it.
Now, according to the normal way of thinking about the Christian religion, we cannot identify with Jesus, we have to imitate Jesus. But to say I am God, as Jesus said, is for us blasphemy. However, in the Thomas gospel, Jesus says, “He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am, and I shall be he.”
Wow. That’s Buddhism. We are all manifestations of Buddha consciousness, only don’t know. And the Buddha, the word means, the awakened one, the one who woke up to the fact that he was Buddha consciousness, and we are all to do that. To wake up to our Jesus within us, this is blasphemy in the normal way of thinking in Christianity, but it’s the very essence of gnosticism and of the Thomas gospel.
BILL MOYERS: And heaven, that desired goal of most people, is within us?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India, already in the ninth century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds are within us. They are magnified dreams, and what dreams are, are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. And that’s all myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, metaphorical images, of the energies within us, moved by the organs of the body, in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, this organ wants this: the brain is one of the organs.
BILL MOYERS: So when we dream, are we fishing in some vast ocean of mythology…
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That goes down and down and down. And you can get all mixed up with complexes, you know, things like that, but you’re standing on the lord of the abyss, really. There’s a Polynesian saying that frequently comes to my mind: “Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.” We are standing on a whale. The ground of being is the ground of our being, and the outward turned, we see all these little problems here, but inward, we are the source of them all. That’s the big mystical teaching.
BILL MOYERS: You’ve seen what’s happened to primitive societies that are unsettled by white men’s civilization. They go to pieces, they disintegrate, they succumb to vice and disease. And isn’t that the same thing that’s been happening to us since our myths began to disappear?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Absolutely it is.
BILL MOYERS: Isn’t that why conservative religious folk today are calling for a return to the old-time religion?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s right.
BILL MOYERS: I understand the yearning. In my youth I had fixed stars; they comforted me with their permanence, they gave me a known horizon; they told me that there’s a loving, kind and just father out there looking down on me, ready to receive me, thinking of my concerns all the time. Now science, medicine has made a house-cleaning of belief, and I wonder what happens to children who don’t have that fixed star, that known horizon, those myths to sustain them?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All you have to do is read the newspaper. I mean, it’s a mess. But what the myth has to provide, I mean, just on this immediate level of life instruction, the pedagogical aspect of myth, it has to give life models. And the models have to be appropriate to the possibilities of the time in which you’re living. And our time has changed, and it’s changed and changed, and it continues to change so fast, that what was proper 50 years ago is not proper today. So the virtues of the past are the vices of today, and many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. And the moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now, and that’s what it’s not doing, and that’s why it’s ridiculous to go back to the old-time religion.
A friend of mine composed a song based on the old-time religion, “Give me the old-time religion, give me that old time. Let us worship Zarathustra, just the way we used to, I’m a Zarathustra booster, he’s good enough for me. Let us worship Aphrodite, she’s beautiful but flighty, she doesn’t wear a nightie, but she’s good enough for me.”
And when you go back to the old-time religion, you’re doing something like that. It belongs to another age, another people, another set of human values, another universe. So the old period of the Old Testament, no one had any idea. The world was a little three layer cake, and the world consisted of something a few hundred miles around the Near Eastern centers there. No one ever heard of the Aztecs, you know, or the Chinese, even. And so those whole peoples were not considered, even, as part of the problem to be dealt with. The world changes, then the religion has to be transformed.
BILL MOYERS: But it seems to me that is what we are in fact doing here.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s in fact what we better do. But my notion of what the real horror today is what you see in Beirut, where you have the three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and because the three of them have three different names for the same biblical God, they can’t get on together, they’re stuck with their metaphor, and don’t realize it’s reference.
BILL MOYERS: So each needs a new myth.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Each needs its own myth, all the way. “Love thine enemy.” you know, open up, don’t judge.
BILL MOYERS: Given what you know about human beings, is it conceivable to you that there is a point of wisdom beyond the conflicts of truth and illusion by which our lives can be put back together again, that we can develop new models?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Sure. It’s in the religions. All religions are true for their time. If you can find what the truth is and separate it from the temporal inflection, just bring your same old religion into a new set of metaphors, and you’ve got it.
BILL MOYERS: Do you see some new metaphors emerging in the modern medium for the old universal truths that you’ve talked about, the old story?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I think that Star Wars is a valid mythological perspective. It shows the state as a machine and asks: Is the machine going to crush humanity, or serve humanity? And humanity comes not from the machine, but from the heart.
