The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [51]
MOYERS: What would happen to me as a child if I went through one of these rites?
CAMPBELL: Well, we don’t know what they did in the caves, but we know what the aborigines do in Australia. Now, when a boy gets to be a little bit ungovernable, one fine day the men come in, and they are naked except for stripes of white bird down that they’ve stuck on their bodies using their own blood for glue. They are swinging the bull-roarers, which are the voices of spirits, and the men arrive as spirits.
The boy will try to take refuge with his mother, and she will pretend to try to protect him. But the men just take him away. A mother is no good from then on, you see. You can’t go back to Mother, you’re in another field.
Then the boys are taken out to the men’s sacred ground, and they’re really put through an ordeal—circumcision, subincision, the drinking of men’s blood, and so forth. Just as they had drunk mother’s milk as children, so now they drink men’s blood. They’re being turned into men. While this is going on, they are being shown enactments of mythological episodes from the great myths. They are instructed in the mythology of the tribe. Then, at the end of this, they are brought back to the village, and the girl whom each is to marry has already been selected. The boy has now come back as a man.
He has been removed from his childhood, and his body has been scarified, and circumcision and subincision have been enacted. Now he has a man’s body. There’s no chance of relapsing back to boyhood after a show like that.
MOYERS: You don’t go back to Mother.
CAMPBELL: No, but in our life we don’t have anything like that. You can have a man forty-five years old still trying to be obedient to his father. So he goes to a psychoanalyst, who does the job for him.
MOYERS: Or he goes to the movies.
CAMPBELL: That might be our counterpart to mythological re-enactments—except that we don’t have the same kind of thinking going into the production of a movie that goes into the production of an initiation ritual.
MOYERS: No, but given the absence of initiation rituals, which have largely disappeared from our society, the world of imagination as projected on that screen serves, even if in a faulty way, to tell that story, doesn’t it?
CAMPBELL: Yes, but what is unfortunate for us is that a lot of the people who write these stories do not have the sense of their responsibility. These stories are making and breaking lives. But the movies are made simply to make money. The kind of responsibility that goes into a priesthood with a ritual is not there. That is one of our problems today.
MOYERS: We have none of those rites today, do we?
CAMPBELL: I’m afraid we don’t. So the youngsters invent them themselves, and you have these raiding gangs, and so forth—that is self-rendered initiation.
MOYERS: So myth relates directly to ceremony and tribal ritual, and the absence of myth can mean the end of ritual.
CAMPBELL: A ritual is the enactment of a myth. By participating in a ritual, you are participating in a myth.
MOYERS: What does the absence of these myths mean to young boys today?
CAMPBELL: Well, the confirmation ritual is the counterpart today of these rites. As a Catholic boy, you choose your confirmed name, the name you are going to be confirmed by. But instead of scarifying you and knocking your teeth out and all, the bishop gives you a smile and a slap on the cheek. It has been reduced to that. Nothing has happened to you. The Jewish counterpart is the bar mitzvah. Whether it actually works to effect a psychological transformation will depend on the individual case, I suppose. But in those old days there was no problem. The boy came out with a different body, and he had really gone through something.
MOYERS: What about the female? Most of the figures in the temple caves are male. Was this a kind of secret society for