The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [11]
CAMPBELL: That is not only a license but something that is put upon him—he has an obligation to educate himself in public. Now, I remember when I was a young man going to hear Heinrich Zimmer lecture. He was the first man I know of to speak about myths as though they had messages that were valid for life, not just interesting things for scholars to fool around with. And that confirmed me in a feeling I had had ever since boyhood.
MOYERS: Do you remember the first time you discovered myth? The first time the story came alive in you?
CAMPBELL: I was brought up as a Roman Catholic. Now, one of the great advantages of being brought up a Roman Catholic is that you’re taught to take myth seriously and to let it operate on your life and to live in terms of these mythic motifs. I was brought up in terms of the seasonal relationships to the cycle of Christ’s coming into the world, teaching in the world, dying, resurrecting, and returning to heaven. The ceremonies all through the year keep you in mind of the eternal core of all that changes in time. Sin is simply getting out of touch with that harmony.
And then I fell in love with American Indians because Buffalo Bill used to come to Madison Square Garden every year with his marvelous Wild West Show. And I wanted to know more about Indians. My father and mother were very generous parents and found what books were being written for boys about Indians at that time. So I began to read American Indian myths, and it wasn’t long before I found the same motifs in the American Indian stories that I was being taught by the nuns at school.
MOYERS: Creation—
CAMPBELL: —creation, death and resurrection, ascension to heaven, virgin births—I didn’t know what it was, but I recognized the vocabulary. One after another.
MOYERS: And what happened?
CAMPBELL: I was excited. That was the beginning of my interest in comparative mythology.
MOYERS: Did you begin by asking, “Why does it say it this way while the Bible says it that way?”
CAMPBELL: No, I didn’t start the comparative analysis until many years later.
MOYERS: What appealed to you about the Indian stories?
CAMPBELL: In those days there was still American Indian lore in the air. Indians were still around. Even now, when I deal with myths from all parts of the world, I find the American Indian tales and narratives to be very rich, very well developed.
And then my parents had a place out in the woods where the Delaware Indians had lived, and the Iroquois had come down and fought them. There was a big ledge where we could dig for Indian arrowheads and things like that. And the very animals that play the role in the Indian stories were there in the woods around me. It was a grand introduction to this material.
MOYERS: Did these stories begin to collide with your Catholic faith?
CAMPBELL: No, there was no collision. The collision with my religion came much later in relation to scientific studies and things of that kind. Later I became interested in Hinduism, and there were the same stories again. And in my graduate work I was dealing with the Arthurian medieval material, and there were the same stories again. So you can’t tell me that they’re not the same stories. I’ve been with them all my life.
MOYERS: They come from every culture but with timeless themes.
CAMPBELL: The themes are timeless, and the inflection is to the culture.
MOYERS: So the stories may take the same universal theme but apply it slightly differently, depending upon the accent of the people who are speaking?
CAMPBELL: Oh, yes. If you were not alert to the parallel themes, you perhaps would think they were quite different stories, but they’re not.
MOYERS: You taught mythology for thirty-eight years at Sarah Lawrence. How did you get these young women, coming to college from their middle-class backgrounds, from their orthodox religions—how did you get them interested in myths?
CAMPBELL: Young people just grab this stuff. Mythology teaches you what’s behind literature and the arts, it