The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [49]
And the magpie says, “Well, there is a lovely girl with the buffalo right now, over there, just a bit away.”
“Well,” says the man, “will you go tell her that her daddy is here at the buffalo wallow?”
So the magpie flies over and finds the girl who is there among the buffalo. They’re all asleep, and she is knitting or something of the kind. And the magpie comes over, and he says, “Your father is over at the wallow waiting for you.”
“Oh,” she says, “this is terrible. This is very dangerous. These buffalo are going to kill us. You tell him to wait, and I’ll be over. I’ll try to work this out.”
Now, her buffalo husband is behind her, and he wakes up and takes off his horn, and says, “Go to the wallow and get me a drink.”
So she takes the horn and goes over, and there is her father. He grabs her by the arm and says, “Come!”
But she says, “No, no, no! This is real danger. The whole herd will be right after us. I have to work this thing out. Now, let me just go back.”
So she gets the water and goes back. And the buffalo says, “Fe, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Indian”—you know, that sort of thing. And she says, no, nothing of the kind. And he says, “Yes indeed!” And he gives a buffalo bellow, and all the buffalo get up, and they all do a slow buffalo dance with tails raised, and they go over, and they trample that poor man to death, so that he disappears entirely. He is just all broken up to pieces. All gone. The girl is crying, and her buffalo husband says, “So you are crying.”
“Yes,” she says, “he is my daddy.”
“Well,” he says, “but what about us? There are our children, at the bottom of the cliff, our wives, our parents—and you cry about your daddy.” Well, apparently he was a kind of compassionate buffalo, and he said, “Okay, if you can bring your daddy back to life again, I will let you go.”
So she turns to the magpie and says, “Please pick around a little bit and see if you can find a bit of Daddy.” And the magpie does so, and he comes up finally with a vertebra, just one little bone. And the girl says, “That’s enough.” And she puts the bone down on the ground and covers it with her blanket and sings a revivifying song, a magical song with great power. And presently—yes, there is a man under the blanket. She looks. “That’s Daddy all right!” But he is not breathing yet. She sings a few more stanzas of whatever the song was, and he stands up.
The buffalo are amazed. And they say, “Well, why don’t you do this for us? We’ll teach you our buffalo dance, and when you will have killed our families, you do this dance and sing this song, and we will all come back to live again.”
And that is the basic idea—that through the ritual that dimension is reached that transcends temporality and out of which life comes and back into which it goes.
MOYERS: What happened a hundred years ago when the white man came and slaughtered this animal of reverence?
CAMPBELL: That was a sacramental violation. You can see in many of the early nineteenth-century paintings by George Catlin of the Great Western Plains in his day literally hundreds of thousands of buffalo all over the place. And then, through the next half century, the frontiersmen, equipped with repeating rifles, shot down whole herds, taking only the skins to sell and leaving the bodies there to rot. This was a sacrilege.
MOYERS: It turned the buffalo from a “thou”—
CAMPBELL: —to an “it.”
MOYERS: The Indians addressed the buffalo as “thou,” an object of reverence.
CAMPBELL: The Indians addressed all of life as a “thou”—the trees, the stones, everything. You can address anything as a “thou,” and if you do it, you can feel the change in your own psychology. The ego that sees a “thou” is not the same ego that sees an “it.” And when you go to war with people, the problem of the newspapers is to turn those people into “its.”
MOYERS: This happens in marriage, too, doesn’t it? And happens with children,