The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [20]
All men are capable of reason. That is the fundamental principle of democracy. Because everybody’s mind is capable of true knowledge, you don’t have to have a special authority, or a special revelation telling you that this is the way things should be.
MOYERS: And yet these symbols come from mythology.
CAMPBELL: Yes, but they come from a certain quality of mythology. It’s not the mythology of a special revelation. The Hindus, for example, don’t believe in special revelation. They speak of a state in which the ears have opened to the song of the universe. Here the eye has opened to the radiance of the mind of God. And that’s a fundamental deist idea. Once you reject the idea of the Fall in the Garden, man is not cut off from his source.
Now back to the Great Seal. When you count the number of ranges on this pyramid, you find there are thirteen. And when you come to the bottom, there is an inscription in Roman numerals. It is, of course, 1776. Then, when you add one and seven and seven and six, you get twenty-one, which is the age of reason, is it not? It was in 1776 that the thirteen states declared independence. The number thirteen is the number of transformation and rebirth. At the Last Supper there were twelve apostles and one Christ, who was going to die and be reborn. Thirteen is the number of getting out of the field of the bounds of twelve into the transcendent. You have the twelve signs of the zodiac and the sun. These men were very conscious of the number thirteen as the number of resurrection and rebirth and new life, and they played it up here all the way through.
MOYERS: But, as a practical matter, there were thirteen states.
CAMPBELL: Yes, but wasn’t that symbolic? This is not simply coincidental. This is the thirteen states as themselves symbolic of what they were.
MOYERS: That would explain the other inscription down there, “Novus Ordo Seclorum.”
CAMPBELL: “A new order of the world.” This is a new order of the world. And the saying above, “Annuit Coeptis,” means “He has smiled on our accomplishments” or “our activities.”
MOYERS: He—
CAMPBELL: He, the eye, what is represented by the eye. Reason. In Latin you wouldn’t have to say “he,” it could be “it” or “she” or “he.” But the divine power has smiled on our doings. And so this new world has been built in the sense of God’s original creation, and the reflection of God’s original creation, through reason, has brought this about.
If you look behind that pyramid, you see a desert. If you look before it, you see plants growing. The desert, the tumult in Europe, wars and wars and wars—we have pulled ourselves out of it and created a state in the name of reason, not in the name of power, and out of that will come the flowerings of the new life. That’s the sense of that part of the pyramid.
Now look at the right side of the dollar bill. Here’s the eagle, the bird of Zeus. The eagle is the downcoming of the god into the field of time. The bird is the incarnation principle of the deity. This is the bald eagle, the American eagle. This is the American counterpart of the eagle of the highest god, Zeus.
He comes down, descending into the world of the pairs of opposites, the field of action. One mode of action is war and the other is peace. So in one of his feet the eagle holds thirteen arrows—that’s the principle of war. In the other he holds a laurel leaf with thirteen leaves—that is the principle of peaceful conversation. The eagle is looking in the direction of the laurel. That is the way these idealists who founded our country would wish us to be looking—diplomatic relationships and so forth. But thank God he’s got the arrows in the other foot, in case this doesn’t work.
Now, what does the eagle represent? He represents what is indicated in this radiant