The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [100]
We have found hundreds of early European Neolithic figurines of the Goddess, but hardly anything there of the male figure at all. The bull and certain other animals, such as the boar and the goat, may appear as symbolic of the male power, but the Goddess was the only visualized divinity at that time.
And when you have a Goddess as the creator, it’s her own body that is the universe. She is identical with the universe. That’s the sense of that Goddess Nut figure that you saw in the Egyptian temple. She is the whole sphere of the life-enclosing heavens.
MOYERS: There is one scene of the Goddess swallowing the sun. Remember?
CAMPBELL: The idea is that she swallows the sun in the west and gives birth to the sun in the east, and it passes through her body at night.
MOYERS: So it would be natural for people trying to explain the wonders of the universe to look to the female figure as the explanation of what they see in their own lives.
CAMPBELL: Not only that, but when you move to a philosophical point of view, as in the Goddess religions of India—where the Goddess symbology is dominant to this day—the female represents maya. The female represents what in Kantian terminology we call the forms of sensibility. She is time and space itself, and the mystery beyond her is beyond all pairs of opposites. So it isn’t male and it isn’t female. It neither is nor is not. But everything is within her, so that the gods are her children. Everything you can think of, everything you can see, is a production of the Goddess.
I once saw a marvelous scientific movie about protoplasm. It was a revelation to me. It is in movement all the time, flowing. Sometimes it seems to be flowing this way and that, and then it shapes things. It has a potentiality for bringing things into shape. I saw this movie in northern California, and as I drove down the coast to Big Sur, all the way, all I could see was protoplasm in the form of grass being eaten by protoplasm in the form of cows; protoplasm in the form of birds diving for protoplasm in the form of fish. You just got this wonderful sense of the abyss from which all has come. But each form has its own intentions, its own possibilities, and that’s where meaning comes. Not in the protoplasm itself.
MOYERS: We are right back, then, to the Indians, who believe that the informing life and energy of all things is the earth. You quote those lines from the Upanishads: “Thou art the dark blue bird, and the green parrot with red eyes. Thou hast the lightning as thy child. Thou art the season and the seas. Having no beginning, thou dost abide with immanence, whereof all things are born.” That is this idea, isn’t it—that we and the earth are the same?
But wasn’t it inevitable that this idea would die under the weight of scientific discoveries? We know now that plants don’t grow out of the bodies of dead people, they grow according to the laws of seed, and soil, and sun. Didn’t Newton kill myth?
CAMPBELL: Oh, I think myth is coming back. There’s a young scientist today who’s using the term “morphogenetic field,” the field that produces forms. That’s who the Goddess is, the field that produces forms.
MOYERS: What’s the significance for us?
CAMPBELL: Well, it means to find what is the source of your own life, and what is the relationship of your body, your physical form, to this energy that animates it. The body without the energy isn’t alive, is it? So you distinguish in your own life that which is of the body and that which is of energy and consciousness.
In India, the most common ultimate symbol is of the phallus, or lingam, as they