The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [102]
MOYERS: And the interest turned from the Goddess to her son, this young political upstart who—
CAMPBELL: Well, the interest turned to the interest specifically of the male governors of the city of Babylon.
MOYERS: So the matriarchal society began to give way to a—
CAMPBELL: Oh, by that time—1750 B.C. or so—it was finished.
MOYERS: There are women today who say that the spirit of the Goddess has been in exile for five thousand years, since the—
CAMPBELL: You can’t put it that far back, five thousand years. She was a very potent figure in Hellenistic times in the Mediterranean, and she came back with the Virgin in the Roman Catholic tradition. You don’t have a tradition with the Goddess celebrated any more beautifully and marvelously than in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century French cathedrals, every one of which is called Notre Dame.
MOYERS: Yes, but all of those motifs and themes were controlled by males—priests, bishops—who excluded women, so whatever the form might have meant to the believer, for the purpose of power the image was in the hands of the dominant male figure.
CAMPBELL: You can put an accent on it that way, but I think it’s a little too strong because there were the great female saints. Hildegarde of Bingen—she was a match for Innocent III. And Eleanor of Aquitaine—I don’t think there is anybody in the Middle Ages who has the stature to match hers. One now can look back and quarrel with the whole situation, but the situation of women was not that bad by any means.
MOYERS: No, but none of those saints would ever become pope.
CAMPBELL: Becoming pope, that’s not much of a job, really. That’s a business position. None of the popes could ever have become the mother of Christ. There are different roles to play. It was the male’s job to protect the women.
MOYERS: That’s where the paternalistic idea grew.
CAMPBELL: Women are booty, they are goods. With the fall of a city, every woman in the city would be raped.
MOYERS: There’s this ethical contradiction mentioned in your book, quoting Exodus: “Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife—except abroad. Then you should put all males to the sword, and the women you shall take as booty to yourself.” That’s right out of the Old Testament.
CAMPBELL: Deuteronomy. Those are fierce passages.
MOYERS: And what do they say to you about women?
CAMPBELL: They say more about Deuteronomy than about women. The Hebrews were absolutely ruthless with respect to their neighbors. But this passage is an extreme statement of something that is inherent in most sociologically oriented mythologies. That is to say, love and compassion are reserved for the in-group, and aggression and abuse are projected outward on others. Compassion is to be reserved for members of your own group. The out-group is to be treated in a way described there in Deuteronomy.
Now, today there is no out-group anymore on the planet. And the problem of a modern religion is to have such compassion work for the whole of humanity. But then what happens to the aggression? This is a problem that the world is going to, have to face—because aggression is a natural instinct just as much as, and more immediate than, compassion, and it is always going to be there. It’s a biological fact. Of course, in biblical times, when the Hebrews came in, they really wiped out the Goddess. The term for the Canaanite goddess that’s used in the Old Testament is “the Abomination.” Apparently, throughout the period represented in the Book of Kings, for example, there was a back and forth between the two cults. Many of the Hebrew kings were condemned in the Old Testament for having worshiped on the mountaintops. Those mountains were symbols of the Goddess. And there was a very strong accent against the Goddess in the Hebrew, which you do not find in the Indo-European mythologies. Here you have