The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [48]
Now, there is another story from a totally different sphere of society, of the samurai, the Japanese warrior, who had the duty to avenge the murder of his overlord. When he cornered the man who had murdered his overlord, and he was about to deal with him with his samurai sword, the man in the corner, in the passion of terror, spat in the warrior’s face. And the warrior sheathed the sword and walked away.
MOYERS: Why?
CAMPBELL: Because he was made angry, and if he had killed that man in anger, then it would have been a personal act. And he had come to do another kind of act, an impersonal act of vengeance.
MOYERS: Do you think this kind of impersonality played some part in the psyche of the hunter on the Great Plains?
CAMPBELL: Yes, definitely. Because isn’t it a moral problem to kill somebody and eat that person? You see, these people didn’t think of animals the way we do, as some subspecies. Animals are our equals at least, and sometimes our superiors.
The animal has powers that the human doesn’t have. The shaman, for instance, will often have an animal familiar, that is to say, the spirit of some animal species that will be his support and his teacher.
MOYERS: But if humans begin to be able to imagine and see beauty and create beauty out of the relationship, then they become superior to the animals, do they not?
CAMPBELL: Well, I don’t think they are thinking as much about superiority as equality. They ask the animals for advice, and the animal becomes the model for how to live. In that case, it is superior. And sometimes the animal becomes the giver of a ritual, as in the legends of the origins of the buffalo. For example, you can see this equality in the basic legend of the Blackfoot tribe, which is the origin legend of their buffalo dance rituals by which they invoke the cooperation of the animals in this play of life.
MOYERS: What was that?
CAMPBELL: Well, this story arises from the problem of how you find food for a large tribal group. One way of acquiring meat for the winter would be to drive a buffalo herd over a rock cliff so that they would all tumble over and could be slaughtered easily at the foot of the cliff. This is known as a buffalo fall.
This story is of a Blackfoot tribe, long, long ago, who couldn’t get the buffalo to go over the cliff. The buffalo would approach the cliff and then turn aside. So it looked as though the tribe wasn’t going to have any meat for that winter.
One day, the daughter of one of the houses got up early in the morning to draw the water for the family and happened to look up to the cliff. There on the cliff were the buffalo. And she said, “Oh, if you would only come over, I would marry one of you.”
To her surprise, they all began coming over. Now, that was surprise number one. Surprise number two was when one of the old buffalo, the shaman of the herd, comes and says, “All right, girlie, off we go.”
“Oh, no,” she says.
“Oh, yes,” he says, “you made your promise. We’ve kept our side of the bargain. Look at all my relatives here—dead. Now off we go.”
Well, the family gets up in the morning and they look around, and where is Minnehaha? The father looks around on the ground—you know how Indians are, he can see by the footprints—and he says, “She’s gone off with a buffalo. And I’m going to get her back.”
So he puts on his walking moccasins, his bow and arrow, and so forth, and goes out over the plains. He has gone quite a distance when he feels he better sit down and rest. So he sits down, and he is thinking about what he should do now, when along comes the magpie, one of those clever birds that has shamanic qualities.
MOYERS: Magical qualities.
CAMPBELL: Yes. And the Indian