The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [18]
MOYERS: Isn’t that a story about what happens when human beings destroy their environment? Destroy their world? Destroy nature and the revelations of nature?
CAMPBELL: They destroy their own nature, too. They kill the song.
MOYERS: And isn’t mythology the story of the song?
CAMPBELL: Mythology is the song. It is the song of the imagination, inspired by the energies of the body. Once a Zen master stood up before his students and was about to deliver a sermon. And just as he was about to open his mouth, a bird sang. And he said, “The sermon has been delivered.”
MOYERS: I was about to say that we are creating new myths, but you say no, every myth we tell today has some point of origin in our past experience.
CAMPBELL: The main motifs of the myths are the same, and they have always been the same. If you want to find your own mythology, the key is with what society do you associate? Every mythology has grown up in a certain society in a bounded field. Then they come into collision and relationship, and they amalgamate, and you get a more complex mythology.
But today there are no boundaries. The only mythology that is valid today is the mythology of the planet—and we don’t have such a mythology. The closest thing I know to a planetary mythology is Buddhism, which sees all beings as Buddha beings. The only problem is to come to the recognition of that. There is nothing to do. The task is only to know what is, and then to act in relation to the brotherhood of all of these beings.
MOYERS: Brotherhood?
CAMPBELL: Yes. Now brotherhood in most of the myths I know of is confined to a bounded community. In bounded communities, aggression is projected outward.
For example, the ten commandments say, “Thou shalt not kill.” Then the next chapter says, “Go into Canaan and kill everybody in it.” That is a bounded field. The myths of participation and love pertain only to the in-group, and the out-group is totally other. This is the sense of the word “gentile”—the person is not of the same order.
MOYERS: And unless you wear my costume, we are not kin.
CAMPBELL: Yes. Now, what is a myth? The dictionary definition of a myth would be stories about gods. So then you have to ask the next question: What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power or a value system that functions in human life and in the universe—the powers of your own body and of nature. The myths are metaphorical of spiritual potentiality in the human being, and the same powers that animate our life animate the life of the world. But also there are myths and gods that have to do with specific societies or the patron deities of the society. In other words, there are two totally different orders of mythology. There is the mythology that relates you to your nature and to the natural world, of which you’re a part. And there is the mythology that is strictly sociological, linking you to a particular society. You are not simply a natural man, you are a member of a particular group. In the history of European mythology, you can see the interaction of these two systems. Usually the socially oriented system is of a nomadic people who are moving around, so you learn that’s where your center is, in that group. The nature-oriented mythology would be of an earth-cultivating people.
Now, the biblical tradition is a socially oriented mythology. Nature is condemned. In the nineteenth century, scholars thought of mythology and ritual as an attempt to control nature. But that is magic, not mythology or religion. Nature religions are not attempts to control nature but to help you put yourself in accord with it. But when nature is thought of as evil, you don’t put yourself in accord with it, you control it, or try to, and hence the tension, the anxiety, the cutting down of forests, the annihilation of native people. And the accent here separates us from nature.
MOYERS: Is this why we so easily dominate