The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [125]
MOYERS: Jung, the famous psychologist, says that one of the most powerful religious symbols is the circle. He says that the circle is one of the great primordial images of mankind and that, in considering the symbol of the circle, we are analyzing the self. What do you make of that?
CAMPBELL: The whole world is a circle. All of these circular images reflect the psyche, so there may be some relationship between these architectural designs and the actual structuring of our spiritual functions.
When a magician wants to work magic, he puts a circle around himself, and it is within this bounded circle, this hermetically sealed-off area, that powers can be brought into play that are lost outside the circle.
MOYERS: I remember reading about an Indian chief who said, “When we pitch camp, we pitch a camp in a circle. When the eagle builds a nest, the nest is in a circle. When we look at the horizon, the horizon is in a circle.” Circles were very important to some Indians, weren’t they?
CAMPBELL: Yes. But they’re also in much that we’ve inherited from Sumerian mythology. We’ve inherited the circle with the four cardinal points and three hundred and sixty degrees. The official Sumerian year was three hundred and sixty days with five holy days that don’t count, which are outside of time and in which they had ceremonies relating their society to the heavens. Now we’re losing this sense of the circle in relation to time, because we have digital time, where you just have time buzzing by. Out of the digital you get the sense of the flow of time. At Penn Station in New York, there’s a clock with the hours, the minutes, the seconds, the tenths of seconds, and the hundredths of seconds. When you see the hundredths of a second buzzing by, you realize how time is running through you.
The circle, on the other hand, represents totality. Everything within the circle is one thing, which is encircled, enframed. That would be the spatial aspect. But the temporal aspect of the circle is that you leave, go somewhere, and always come back. God is the alpha and the omega, the source and the end. The circle suggests immediately a completed totality, whether in time or in space.
MOYERS: No beginning, no end.
CAMPBELL: Round and round and round. Take the year, for example. When November rolls around, we have Thanksgiving again. Then December comes, and we have Christmas again. Not only does the month roll around again, but also the moon cycle, the day cycle. We’re reminded of this when we look at our watches and see the cycle of time. It’s the same hour, but another day.
MOYERS: China used to call itself the Kingdom of the Center, and the Aztecs had a similar saying about their own culture. I suppose every culture using the circle as the cosmological order puts itself at the center. Why do you suppose the circle became so universally symbolic?
CAMPBELL: Because it’s experienced all the time—in the day, in the year, in leaving home to go on your adventure—hunting or whatever it may be—and coming back home. Then there is a deeper experience, too, the mystery of the womb and the tomb. When people are buried, it’s for rebirth. That’s the origin of the burial idea. You put someone back into the womb of mother earth for rebirth. Very early images of the Goddess show her as a mother receiving the soul back again.
MOYERS: When I read your works—The Masks of God, or The Way of the Animal Powers, or The Mythic Image—I often come across images of the circle, whether it’s in magical designs or in architecture, both ancient and modern; whether it’s in the dome-shaped temples of India or the Paleolithic rock engravings of Rhodesia or the calendar stones of the Aztecs or the ancient Chinese bronze shields or the visions of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, who talks about the wheel in the sky. I keep coming across this image. And this ring, my wedding ring, is a circle, too. What does that symbolize?
CAMPBELL: That depends on how you understand marriage. The word “sym-bol” itself means two things put together. One person has one half,