The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [114]
CAMPBELL: That’s the force of this position. It originated in twelfth-century Provence, and you’ve got it now in twentieth-century Texas.
MOYERS: It’s been shattered of late, I have to tell you that. I mean, I’m not sure that it’s as much of a test as it used to be. I was grateful for the test—I think. I’m not sure.…
CAMPBELL: The tests that were given then involved, for example, sending a chap out to guard a bridge. The traffic in the Middle Ages was somewhat encumbered by these youths guarding bridges. But also the tests included going into battle. A woman who was too ruthless in asking her lover to risk real death before she would acquiesce in anything was considered sauvage or “savage.” Also, the woman who gave herself without the testing was “savage.” There was a very nice psychological estimation game going on here.
MOYERS: The troubadours weren’t aiming, were they, to dissolve marriages or the world, nor was their aim carnal intercourse, lust, or even the quenching of the soul of God. You write, “Rather, they celebrated life directly in the experience of love as a refining, sublimating force, opening the heart to the sad bittersweet melody of being through love, one’s own anguish and one’s own joy.” They weren’t trying to destroy things, were they?
CAMPBELL: No, you see, that motive of power was not what was in them. It was the motive of personal experience and sublimation. It’s quite different. There was no direct attack on the Church. The idea was to sublimate life into a spiritual plane of experiences.
MOYERS: Love is right in front of me. Amor is the path directly before me, the eyes—
CAMPBELL: —the meeting of the eyes, that idea. “So through the eyes love attains the heart: / For the eyes are the scouts of the heart.”
MOYERS: What was it that the troubadours learned about the psyche? We’ve heard about the psyche—Eros loved Psyche—and we’re told in our day that you must understand your psyche. What did the troubadours discover about the human psyche?
CAMPBELL: What they discovered was a certain individual aspect of it that cannot be talked about in purely general terms. The individual experience, the individual commitment to experience, the individual believing in his experience and living it—that is the main point here.
MOYERS: So love is not love in general, it is love for that woman?
CAMPBELL: For that one woman. That’s right.
MOYERS: Why do you think we fall in love with one person and not another?
CAMPBELL: Well, I wouldn’t be one to say. It’s a very mysterious thing, that electric thing that happens, and then the agony that can follow. The troubadours celebrate the agony of the love, the sickness the doctors cannot cure, the wounds that can be healed only by the weapon that delivered the wound.
MOYERS: Meaning?
CAMPBELL: The wound is the wound of my passion and the agony of my love for this creature. The only one who can heal me is the one who delivered the blow. That’s a motif that appears in symbolic form in many medieval stories of the lance that delivers a wound. It is only when that lance can touch the wound again that the wound can be healed.
MOYERS: Wasn’t there something of this idea in the legend of the Holy Grail?
CAMPBELL: In the monastic version of the story, the Grail is associated with Christ’s passion. The Grail is the chalice of the Last Supper and the chalice that received Christ’s blood when he was taken from the cross.
MOYERS: What does the Grail represent then?
CAMPBELL: There’s a very interesting statement about the origin of the Grail. One early writer says that the Grail was brought from heaven by the neutral angels. You see, during the war in heaven between God and Satan, between good and evil, some angelic hosts sided with Satan and some with God. The Grail was brought down through the middle by the neutral angels. It represents that spiritual path that is between pairs of opposites, between fear and desire, between good and evil.
The theme of the Grail romance is that