The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [52]
CAMPBELL: It wasn’t a secret society, it was that the boys had to go through it. Now of course we don’t know exactly what happened to the female in this period because there is very little evidence to tell us. But in primary cultures today the girl becomes a woman with her first menstruation. It happens to her. Nature does it to her. And so she has undergone the transformation, and what is her initiation? Typically it is to sit in a little hut for a certain number of days and realize what she is.
MOYERS: How does she do that?
CAMPBELL: She sits there. She is now a woman. And what is a woman? A woman is a vehicle of life. Life has overtaken her. Woman is what it is all about—the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment. She is identical with the earth goddess in her powers, and she has got to realize that about herself. The boy does not have a happening of this kind, so he has to be turned into a man and voluntarily become a servant of something greater than himself.
MOYERS: This is where the mythic imagination, as far as we know, began to operate.
CAMPBELL: Yes.
MOYERS: What were the chief themes of that era? Death?
CAMPBELL: The mystery of death is one of them—which balances the theme of the mystery of life. It is the same mystery in its two aspects. The next theme is the relationship of this to the animal world, which dies and lives again.
Then there is the motif of procuring food. The relationship of the woman to the nature of the outer world is there. Then we have to take into account the problem of the transformation of children into adults. That transformation is a fundamental concern throughout the ritual life of people. We have it today. There is the problem of turning ungovernable children, who express just the naive impulses of nature, into members of the society. That takes a lot of doing. These people could not tolerate anybody who wouldn’t follow the rules. The society couldn’t support them. They would kill them.
MOYERS: Because they were a threat to the health of the whole?
CAMPBELL: Well, of course. They were like cancers, something that was tearing the body apart. These tribal groups were living on the edge all the time.
MOYERS: And yet out on the edge they began to ask fundamental questions.
CAMPBELL: Yes. But the attitude toward dying wasn’t like ours at all. The notion of a transcendent world was really taken seriously.
MOYERS: One important part of ancient ritual was that it made you a member of the tribe, a member of the community, a member of society. The history of Western culture has been the steadily widening separation of the self from society. “I” first, the individual first.
CAMPBELL: I wouldn’t say that that’s characteristic of Western culture all the way because the separation is not a separation just of a raw biological entity. There has always been the spiritual import until very lately. Now, when you see old newsreels of the installation of the President of the United States, you see him wearing a top hat. President Wilson, even in his time, was wearing a top hat. He did not wear a top hat in his usual life. But, as President, he has a ritual aspect to his presence. Now it’s Johnny-come-lately walking in right off the golf course, you know, and sitting down with you and talking about whether we’re going to have atom bombs. It’s another style. There’s been a reduction of ritual. Even in the Roman Catholic Church, my God—they’ve translated the Mass out of ritual language and into a language that has a lot of domestic associations. The Latin of the Mass was a language that threw you out of the field of domesticity. The altar was turned so that the priest’s back was to you, and with him you addressed yourself outward. Now they’ve turned the altar around—it looks like Julia Child giving a demonstration—all homey and cozy.
MOYERS: And they play a guitar.
CAMPBELL: They play a guitar. They’ve forgotten that the function of ritual is to pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time.
MOYERS: And the ritual of a marriage ceremony pitches you out