The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [16]
CAMPBELL: Well, automobiles have gotten into mythology. They have gotten into dreams. And airplanes are very much in the service of the imagination. The flight of the airplane, for example, is in the imagination as the release from earth. This is the same thing that birds symbolize, in a certain way. The bird is symbolic of the release of the spirit from bondage to the earth, just as the serpent is symbolic of the bondage to the earth. The airplane plays that role now.
MOYERS: Any others?
CAMPBELL: Weapons, of course. Every movie that I have seen on the airplane as I traveled back and forth between California and Hawaii shows people with revolvers. There is the Lord Death, carrying his weapon. Different instruments take over the roles that earlier instruments now no longer serve. But I don’t see any more than that.
MOYERS: So the new myths will serve the old stories. When I saw Star Wars, I remembered the phrase from the apostle Paul, “I wrestle against principalities and powers.” That was two thousand years ago. And in the caves of the early Stone Age hunter, there are scenes of wrestling against principalities and powers. Here in our modern technological myths we are still wrestling.
CAMPBELL: Man should not submit to the powers from outside but command them. How to do it is the problem.
MOYERS: After our youngest son had seen Star Wars for the twelfth or thirteenth time, I said, “Why do you go so often?” He said, “For the same reason you have been reading the Old Testament all of your life.” He was in a new world of myth.
CAMPBELL: Certainly Star Wars has a valid mythological perspective. It shows the state as a machine and asks, “Is the machine going to crush humanity or serve humanity? Humanity comes not from the machine but from the heart. What I see in Star Wars is the same problem that Faust gives us: Mephistopheles, the machine man, can provide us with all the means, and is thus likely to determine the aims of life as well. But of course the characteristic of Faust, which makes him eligible to be saved, is that he seeks aims that are not those of the machine.
Now, when Luke Skywalker unmasks his father, he is taking off the machine role that the father has played. The father was the uniform. That is power, the state role.
MOYERS: Machines help us to fulfill the idea that we want the world to be made in our image, and we want it to be what we think it ought to be.
CAMPBELL: Yes. But then there comes a time when the machine begins to dictate to you. For example, I have bought this wonderful machine—a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine—it seems to me to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.
MOYERS: There is a fetching story about President Eisenhower and the first computers—
CAMPBELL: —Eisenhower went into a room full of computers. And he put the question to these machines, “Is there a God?” And they all start up, and the lights flash, and the wheels turn, and after a while a voice says, “Now there is.”
MOYERS: But isn’t it possible to develop toward your computer the same attitude of the chieftain who said that all things speak of God? If it isn’t a special, privileged revelation, God is everywhere in his work, including the computer.
CAMPBELL: Indeed so. It’s a miracle, what happens on that screen. Have you ever looked inside one of those things?
MOYERS: No, and I don’t intend to.
CAMPBELL: You can’t believe it. It’s a whole hierarchy of angels—all on slats. And those little tubes—those are miracles.
I have had a revelation from my computer about mythology. You buy a certain software, and there is a whole set of signals that lead to the achievement of your aim. If you begin fooling around with signals that belong to another system of software, they just won’t work.
Similarly, in mythology—if you have a mythology in which the metaphor for the mystery is the father, you are going to have a different set of signals from what you would have if the metaphor for the wisdom and mystery