The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [32]
MOYERS: But isn’t the only way a human being can try to grope with this immense idea to assign it a language that he or she understands? God, he, God, she—
CAMPBELL: Yes, but you don’t understand it if you think it is a he or a she. The he or a she is a springboard to spring you into the transcendent, and transcendent means to “transcend,” to go past duality. Everything in the field of time and space is dual. The incarnation appears either as male or as female, and each of us is the incarnation of God. You’re born in only one aspect of your actual metaphysical duality, you might say. This is represented in the mystery religions, where an individual goes through a series of initiations opening him out inside into a deeper and deeper depth of himself, and there comes a moment when he realizes that he is both mortal and immortal, both male and female.
MOYERS: Do you think there was such a place as the Garden of Eden?
CAMPBELL: Of course not. The Garden of Eden is a metaphor for that innocence that is innocent of time, innocent of opposites, and that is the prime center out of which consciousness then becomes aware of the changes.
MOYERS: But if there is in the idea of Eden this innocence, what happens to it? Isn’t it shaken, dominated, and corrupted by fear?
CAMPBELL: That’s it. There is a wonderful story of the deity, of the Self that said, “I am.” As soon as it said “I am,” it was afraid.
MOYERS: Why?
CAMPBELL: It was an entity now, in time. Then it thought, “What should I be afraid of, I’m the only thing that is.” And as soon as it said that, it felt lonesome, and wished that there were another, and so it felt desire. It swelled, split in two, became male and female, and begot the world.
Fear is the first experience of the fetus in the womb. There’s a Czechoslovakian psychiatrist, Stanislav Grof, now living in California, who for years treated people with LSD. And he found that some of them re-experienced birth and, in the re-experiencing of birth, the first stage is that of the fetus in the womb, without any sense of “I” or of being. Then shortly before birth the rhythm of the uterus begins, and there’s terror! Fear is the first thing, the thing that says “I.” Then comes the horrific stage of getting born, the difficult passage through the birth canal, and then—my God, light! Can you imagine! Isn’t it amazing that this repeats just what the myth says—that Self said, “I am,” and immediately felt fear? And then when it realized it was alone, it felt desire for another and became two. That is the breaking into the world of light and the pairs of opposites.
MOYERS: What does it say about what all of us have in common that so many of these stories contain similar elements—the forbidden fruit, the woman? For example, these myths, these creation stories, contain a “thou shalt not.” Man and woman rebel against that prohibition and move out on their own. After years and years of reading these things, I am still overwhelmed at the similarities in cultures that are far, far apart.
CAMPBELL: There is a standard folk tale motif called The One Forbidden Thing. Remember Bluebeard, who says to his wife, “Don’t open that closet”? And then one always disobeys. In the Old Testament story God points out the one forbidden thing. Now, God must have known very well that man was going to eat the forbidden fruit. But it was by doing that that man became the initiator of his own life. Life really began with that act of disobedience.
MOYERS: How do you explain these similarities?
CAMPBELL: There are two explanations. One explanation is that the human psyche is essentially the same all over the world. The psyche is the inward experience of the human body, which is essentially the same in all human beings, with the same organs, the same instincts, the same impulses, the same conflicts, the same fears. Out of this common ground have come what Jung has called the archetypes, which are the common