The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [28]
MOYERS: From the archetypal person within us, the archetypal self we are.
CAMPBELL: That’s right. Now there is another, deeper meaning of dreamtime—which is of a time that is no time, just an enduring state of being. There is an important myth from Indonesia that tells of this mythological age and its termination. In the beginning, according to this story, the ancestors were not distinguished as to sex. There were no births, there were no deaths. Then a great public dance was celebrated, and in the course of the dance one of the participants was trampled to death and torn to pieces, and the pieces were buried. At the moment of that killing the sexes became separated, so that death was now balanced by begetting, begetting by death, while from the buried parts of the dismembered body food plants grew. Time had come into being, death, birth, and the killing and eating of other living beings, for the preservation of life. The timeless time of the beginning had been terminated by a communal crime, a deliberate murder or sacrifice.
Now, one of the main problems of mythology is reconciling the mind to this brutal precondition of all life, which lives by the killing and eating of lives. You don’t kid yourself by eating only vegetables, either, for they, too, are alive. So the essence of life is this eating of itself! Life lives on lives, and the reconciliation of the human mind and sensibilities to that fundamental fact is one of the functions of some of those very brutal rites in which the ritual consists chiefly of killing—in imitation, as it were, of that first, primordial crime, out of which arose this temporal world, in which we all participate. The reconciliation of mind to the conditions of life is fundamental to all creation stories. They’re very like each other in this respect.
MOYERS: Take the creation story in Genesis, for example. How is it like other stories?
CAMPBELL: Well, you read from Genesis, and I’ll read from creation stories in other cultures, and we’ll see.
MOYERS: Genesis 1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
CAMPBELL: This is from “The Song of the World,” a legend of the Pima Indians of Arizona: “In the beginning there was only darkness everywhere—darkness and water. And the darkness gathered thick in places, crowding together and then separating, crowding and separating.…”
MOYERS: Genesis 1: “And the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.”
CAMPBELL: And this is from the Hindu Upanishads, from about the eighth century B.C.: “In the beginning, there was only the great self reflected in the form of a person. Reflecting, it found nothing but itself. Then its first word was, ‘This am I.’ ”
MOYERS: Genesis 1: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’ ”
CAMPBELL: Now, this is from a legend of the Bassari people of West Africa: “Unumbotte made a human being. Its name was Man. Unumbotte next made an antelope, named Antelope. Unumbotte made a snake, named Snake.… And Unumbotte said to them, ‘The earth has not yet been pounded. You must pound the ground smooth where you are sitting.’ Unumbotte gave them seeds of all kinds, and said: ‘Go plant these.’ ”
MOYERS: Genesis 2: “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done.…”
CAMPBELL: And now again from the Pima Indians: “I make the world and lo, the world is finished. Thus I make the world, and lo! The world is finished.”
MOYERS: And Genesis 1: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.”
CAMPBELL: And from the Upanishads: “Then he realized, I indeed, I am this creation, for I