The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [47]
And then they killed some of them for food. I know ranch people who have a pet cow in addition to their ranch animals. They won’t eat the meat of that cow because there is a kind of cannibalism in eating the meat of a friend. But the aborigines were eating the meat of their friends all the time. Some kind of psychological compensation has to be achieved, and the myths help in doing that.
MOYERS: How?
CAMPBELL: These early myths help the psyche to participate without a sense of guilt or fright in the necessary act of life.
MOYERS: And these great stories consistently refer to this dynamic in one way or the other—the hunt, the hunter, the hunted, and the animal as friend, as a messenger from God.
CAMPBELL: Right. Normally the animal preyed upon becomes the animal that is the messenger of the divine.
MOYERS: And you wind up as the hunter killing the messenger.
CAMPBELL: Killing the god.
MOYERS: Does that cause guilt?
CAMPBELL: No, guilt is what is wiped out by the myth. Killing the animal is not a personal act. You are performing the work of nature.
MOYERS: Guilt is wiped out by the myth?
CAMPBELL: Yes.
MOYERS: But you must at times feel some reluctance upon closing in for the kill. You don’t really want to kill that animal.
CAMPBELL: The animal is the father. You know what the Freudians say, that the first enemy is the father, if you are a man. If you are a boy, every enemy is potentially, psychologically associated with the father image.
MOYERS: Do you think that the animal became the father image of God?
CAMPBELL: Yes. It is a fact that the religious attitude toward the principal animal is one of reverence and respect, and not only that—submission to the inspiration of that animal. The animal is the one that brings the gifts—tobacco, the mystical pipe, and so on.
MOYERS: Do you think this troubled early man—to kill the animal that is a god, or the messenger of a god?
CAMPBELL: Absolutely—that is why you have the rites.
MOYERS: What kind of rites?
CAMPBELL: Rituals of appeasement and of thanks to the animal. For example, when the bear is killed, there is a ceremony of feeding the bear a piece of its own flesh. And then there will be a little ceremony with the bear’s skin placed over a kind of rack, as though he were present—and he is present, he serves his own meat for dinner. A fire is burning—and the fire is the goddess. Then there is a conversation between the mountain god, which is the bear, and the fire goddess.
MOYERS: What do they say?
CAMPBELL: Who knows? No one hears them, but there is a little socializing going on there.
MOYERS: If the cave bears were not appeased, the animals wouldn’t appear, and the primitive hunters would starve to death. They began to perceive some kind of power on which they were dependent, a power greater than their own.
CAMPBELL: Yes. That is the power of the animal master, the willingness of the animals to participate in this game. You find among hunting people all over the world a very intimate, appreciative relationship to the principal food animal. Now, when we sit down to a meal, we thank God for giving us the food. These people thanked the animal.
MOYERS: So appeasing the animal with this ritual honoring the animal would be like bribing the butcher at the supermarket.
CAMPBELL: No, I don’t think it would be bribing at all. It is thanking a friend for cooperating in a mutual relationship. And if you didn’t thank him, the species would become offended.
There are rituals that have been described for killing animals. Before the hunter goes to kill, he will draw on the hilltop a picture of the animal that he is about to kill. And that hilltop will be in such a place that the first rays of the rising sun will strike it. When the sun rises, the hunter is waiting there with a little team of people to perform the rites. And when the light strikes the animal picture, the hunter’s arrow flies right