The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [22]
MOYERS: The voice of reason—is that the philosophical way suggested by these mythological symbols?
CAMPBELL: That’s right. Here you have the important transition that took place about 500 B.C. This is the date of the Buddha and of Pythagoras and Confucius and Lao-tzu, if there was a Lao-tzu. This is the awakening of man’s reason. No longer is he informed and governed by the animal powers. No longer is he guided by the analogy of the planted earth, no longer by the courses of the planets—but by reason.
MOYERS: The way of—
CAMPBELL: —the way of man. And of course what destroys reason is passion. The principal passion in politics is greed. That is what pulls you down. And that’s why we’re on this side instead of the top of the pyramid.
MOYERS: That’s why our founders opposed religious intolerance—
CAMPBELL: That was out entirely. And that’s why they rejected the idea of the Fall, too. All men are competent to know the mind of God. There is no revelation special to any people.
MOYERS: I can see how, from your years of scholarship and deep immersion in these mythological symbols, you would read the Great Seal that way. But wouldn’t it have been surprising to most of those men who were deists, as you say, to discover these mythological connotations about their effort to build a new country?
CAMPBELL: Well, why did they use them?
MOYERS: Aren’t a lot of these Masonic symbols?
CAMPBELL: They are Masonic signs, and the meaning of the Pythagorean tetrakys has been known for centuries. The information would have been found in Thomas Jefferson’s library. These were, after all, learned men. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was a world of learned gentlemen. We haven’t had men of that quality in politics very much. It’s an enormous good fortune for our nation that that cluster of gentlemen had the power and were in a position to influence events at that time.
MOYERS: What explains the relationship between these symbols and the Masons, and the fact that so many of these founding fathers belonged to the Masonic order? Is the Masonic order an expression somehow of mythological thinking?
CAMPBELL: Yes, I think it is. This is a scholarly attempt to reconstruct an order of initiation that would result in spiritual revelation. These founding fathers who were Masons actually studied what they could of Egyptian lore. In Egypt, the pyramid represents the primordial hillock. After the annual flood of the Nile begins to sink down, the first hillock is symbolic of the reborn world. That’s what this seal represents.
MOYERS: You sometimes confound me with the seeming contradiction at the heart of your own belief system. On the one hand, you praise these men who were inspirers and creatures of the Age of Reason, and on the other hand, you salute Luke Skywalker in Star Wars for that moment when he says, “Turn off the computer and trust your feelings.” How do you reconcile the role of science, which is reason, with the role of faith, which is religion?
CAMPBELL: No, no, you have to distinguish between reason and thinking.
MOYERS: Distinguish between reason and thinking? If I think, am I not reasoning things out?
CAMPBELL: Yes, your reason is one kind of thinking. But thinking things out isn’t necessarily reason in this sense. Figuring out how you can break through a wall is not reason. The mouse who figures out, after it bumps its nose here, that perhaps he can get around there, is figuring something out the way we figure things out. But that’s not reason. Reason has to do with finding the ground of being and the fundamental