The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [118]
MOYERS: In the sacred marriage, what God has joined together is one and cannot be sundered by man.
CAMPBELL: It was one to begin with, and the marriage restates that unity symbolically.
MOYERS: It was one to begin with?
CAMPBELL: Marriage is the symbolic recognition of our identity—two aspects of the same being.
MOYERS: You know the curious old legend of the blind prophet Tiresias?
CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s a grand story. Tiresias was walking through the forest one day when he saw two copulating serpents. And he placed his staff between them and was transformed into a woman, and lived as a woman for a number of years. Then again, Tiresias the woman was walking through the forest when she saw two copulating serpents and placed her staff between them and was turned back into a man.
Well, one fine day on Capitol Hill, the Hill of Zeus—
MOYERS: Mount Olympus?
CAMPBELL: —Mount Olympus, yes—Zeus and his Wife were arguing as to who enjoyed sexual intercourse the more, the male or the female. And of course nobody there could decide because they were only on one side of the net, you might say. Then someone said, “Let’s ask Tiresias.”
So they go to Tiresias, and they ask him the question, and he says, “Why, the woman, nine times more than the man.” Well, for some reason that I don’t really understand, Hera, the wife of Zeus, took this badly and struck him blind. And Zeus, feeling a certain responsibility, gave Tiresias the gift of prophecy within his blindness. There’s a good point there—when your eyes are closed to distracting phenomena, you’re in your intuition, and you may come in touch with the morphology, the basic form of things.
MOYERS: Well, what’s the point—that Tiresias, having been transformed into a man and then a woman by the serpents, had knowledge of both the female and the male experience and knew more than either the god or the goddess knew alone?
CAMPBELL: That’s correct. Furthermore, he represented symbolically the fact of the unity of the two. And when Odysseus was sent to the underworld by Circe, his true initiation came when he met Tiresias and realized the unity of male and female.
MOYERS: I’ve often thought that if you could get in touch with your feminine side, or, if you’re a woman, your masculine side, you would know what the gods know and maybe beyond what the gods know.
CAMPBELL: That’s the information that one gets from being married. That’s the way you get in touch with your feminine side.
MOYERS: But what happens to this self-discovery in love when you meet someone else, and you suddenly feel, “I know that person,” or “I want to know that person”?
CAMPBELL: That’s very mysterious. It’s almost as though the future life that you’re going to have with that person has already told you, This is the one whom you will have that life with.
MOYERS: Is that something coming from within our inventory of memories that we don’t understand and don’t recognize? Reaching out and being touched by that person in a way—
CAMPBELL: It’s almost as though you were reacting to the future. It’s talking to you from what is to be. This has to do with the mystery of time and the transcendence of time. But I think we’re touching a very deep mystery here.
MOYERS: Do you in your own life just leave it there as a mystery? Or do you think that one can successfully have a marriage and a relationship other than the marriage?
CAMPBELL: Technically, one could say, “Why, yes, of course.”
MOYERS: But it seems that whatever one gives to the love affair is barred from the marriage relationship and diminishes the loyalty to the relationship.
CAMPBELL: I think one has to work out these things oneself. There could be a love seizure after you