The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [109]
MOYERS: That’s why I’m not so sure the future of the race and the salvation of the journey is in space. I think it might be right here on earth, in the body, in the womb of our being.
CAMPBELL: Well, it certainly is. When you go out into space, what you’re carrying is your body, and if that hasn’t been transformed, space won’t transform you. But thinking about space may help you to realize something. There’s a two-page spread in a world atlas which shows our galaxy within many galaxies, and within our galaxy the solar system. And here you get a sense of the magnitude of this space that we’re now finding out about. What those pages opened to me was the vision of a universe of unimaginable magnitude and inconceivable violence. Billions upon billions of roaring thermonuclear furnaces scattering from each other. Each thermonuclear furnace a star, and our sun among them. Many of them actually blowing themselves to pieces, littering the outermost reaches of space with dust and gas out of which new stars with circling planets are being born right now. And then from still more remote distances beyond all these there come murmurs, microwaves that are echoes of the greatest cataclysmic explosion of all, namely the big bang of creation, which, according to some reckonings, may have occurred some eighteen billion years ago.
That’s where we are, kiddo, and to realize that, you realize how really important you are, you know—one little microbit in that great magnitude. And then must come the experience that you and that are in some sense one, and you partake of all of that.
MOYERS: And it begins here.
CAMPBELL: It begins here.
VII
TALES OF LOVE
AND MARRIAGE
So through the eyes love attains the heart:
For the eyes are the scouts of the heart,
And the eyes go reconnoitering
For what it would please the heart to possess.
And when they are in full accord
And firm, all three, in the one resolve,
At that time, perfect love is born
From what the eyes have made welcome to the heart.
Not otherwise can love either be born or have commencement
Than by this birth and commencement moved by inclination.
By the grace and by command
Of these three, and from their pleasure,
Love is born, who its fair hope
Goes comforting her friends.
For as all true lovers
Know, love is perfect kindness,
Which is born—there is no doubt—from the heart and eyes.
The eyes make it blossom; the heart matures it:
Love, which is the fruit of their very seed.
—GUIRAUT DE BORNEILH (ca. 1138–1200?)
MOYERS: Love is such a vast subject that—well, if I came to you and said, “Let’s talk about love,” where would you begin?
CAMPBELL: I’d begin with the troubadours in the twelfth century.
MOYERS: And who were they?
CAMPBELL: The troubadours were the nobility of Provence and then later other parts of France and Europe. In Germany they’re known as the Minnesingers, the singers of love. Minne is the medieval German word for love.
MOYERS: Were they the poets of their age?
CAMPBELL: They were poets of a certain character, yes. The period for the troubadours is the twelfth century. The whole troubadour tradition was extinguished in Provence in the so-called Albigensian Crusade of 1209, which was launched by Pope Innocent III, and which is regarded as one of the most monstrous crusades in the history of Europe.
The troubadours became associated with the Manichean heresy of the Albigensians that was rampant at that time—though the Albigensian movement was really a protest against the corruption of the medieval clergy. So the troubadours and their transformation of the idea of love got mixed up in religious life in a very complicated way.
MOYERS: The transformation of love? What do you mean?
CAMPBELL: The troubadours were very much interested in the psychology of love. And they’re