The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [126]
MOYERS: When a new pope is installed, he takes the fisherman’s ring—another circle.
CAMPBELL: That particular ring is symbolic of Jesus calling the apostles, who were fishermen. He said, “I will make you fishers of men.” This is an old motif that is earlier than Christianity. Orpheus is called “The Fisher,” who fishes men, who are living as fish in the water, out up into the light. It’s an old idea of the metamorphosis of the fish into man. The fish nature is the crudest animal nature of our character, and the religious line is intended to pull you up out of that.
MOYERS: A new king or new queen of England is given the coronation ring.
CAMPBELL: Yes, because there’s another aspect of the ring—it is a bondage. As king, you are bound to a principle. You are living not simply your own way. You have been marked. In initiation rites, when people are sacrified and tattooed, they are bonded to another and to the society.
MOYERS: Jung speaks of the circle as a mandala.
CAMPBELL: “Mandala” is the Sanskrit word for “circle,” but a circle that is coordinated or symbolically designed so that it has the meaning of a cosmic order. When composing mandalas, you are trying to coordinate your personal circle with the universal circle. In a very elaborate Buddhist mandala, for example, you have the deity in the center as the power source, the illumination source. The peripheral images would be manifestations or aspects of the deity’s radiance.
In working out a mandala for yourself, you draw a circle and then think of the different impulse systems and value systems in your life. Then you compose them and try to find out where your center is. Making a mandala is a discipline for pulling all those scattered aspects of your life together, for finding a center and ordering yourself to it. You try to coordinate your circle with the universal circle.
MOYERS: To be at the center?
CAMPBELL: At the center, yes. For instance, among the Navaho Indians, healing ceremonies are conducted through sand paintings, which are mostly mandalas on the ground. The person who is to be treated moves into the mandala as a way of moving into a mythological context that he will be identifying with—he identifies himself with the symbolized power. This idea of sand painting with mandalas, and their use for meditation purposes, appears also in Tibet. Tibetan monks practice sand painting, drawing cosmic images to represent the forces of the spiritual powers that operate in our lives.
MOYERS: There is some effort, apparently, to try to center one’s life with the center of the universe—
CAMPBELL: —by way of mythological imagery, yes. The image helps you to identify with the symbolized force. You can’t very well expect a person to identify with an undifferentiated something or other. But when you give it qualities that point toward certain realizations, the person can follow.
MOYERS: There is one theory that the Holy Grail represented the center of perfect harmony, the search for perfection, for totality and unity.
CAMPBELL: There are a number of sources for the Holy Grail. One is that there is a cauldron of plenty in the mansion of the god of the sea, down in the depths of the unconscious. It is out of the depths of the unconscious that the energies of life come to us. This cauldron is the inexhaustible source, the center, the bubbling spring from which all life proceeds.
MOYERS: Do you think that is the unconscious?
CAMPBELL: Not only the unconscious but also the vale of the world. Things are coming to life around you all the time. There is a life pouring into the World, and it pours from an inexhaustible source.
MOYERS: Now, what do you make of that—that in very different cultures, separated by time and space, the same imagery emerges?
CAMPBELL: This speaks for