The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [53]
CAMPBELL: It certainly does. But the rituals that once conveyed an inner reality are now merely form. That’s true in the rituals of society as well as the personal rituals of marriage.
MOYERS: So I can see why in some respects religious instruction has become obsolete to a lot of people.
CAMPBELL: With respect to ritual, it must be kept alive. So much of our ritual is dead. It’s extremely interesting to read of the primitive, elementary cultures—how they transform the folk tales, the myths, all the time in terms of the circumstances. People move from an area where, let’s say, the vegetation is the main support, out into the plains. Most of our Plains Indians in the period of the horse-riding Indians had originally been of the Mississippifan culture. They lived along the Mississippi in settled dwelling towns and agriculturally based villages.
And then they receive the horse from the Spaniards, which makes it possible to venture out into the plains and handle the great hunt of the buffalo herds. At this time, the mythology transforms from a vegetation mythology to a buffalo mythology. You can see the structure of the earlier vegetation mythologies underlying the mythologies of the Dakota Indians and the Pawnee Indians and the Kiowa, and so forth.
MOYERS: You’re saying that the environment shapes the story?
CAMPBELL: The people respond to the environment, you see. But now we have a tradition that doesn’t respond to the environment—it comes from somewhere else, from the first millennium B.C. It has not assimilated the qualities of our modern culture and the new things that are possible and the new vision of the universe.
Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world.
MOYERS: You mean artists are the mythmakers of our day?
CAMPBELL: The mythmakers of earlier days were the counterparts of our artists.
MOYERS: They do the paintings on the walls, they perform the rituals.
CAMPBELL: Yes. There’s an old romantic idea in German, das Volk dichtet, which says that the ideas and poetry of the traditional cultures come out of the folk. They do not. They come out of an elite experience, the experience of people particularly gifted, whose ears are open to the song of the universe. These people speak to the folk, and there is an answer from the folk, which is then received as an interaction. But the first impulse in the shaping of a folk tradition comes from above, not from below.
MOYERS: In these early elementary cultures, as you call them, who would have been the equivalent of the poets today?
CAMPBELL: The shamans. The shaman is the person, male or female, who in his late childhood or early youth has an overwhelming psychological experience that turns him totally inward. It’s a kind of schizophrenic crack-up. The whole unconscious opens up, and the shaman falls into it. This shaman experience has been described many, many times. It occurs all the way from Siberia right through the Americas down to Tierra del Fuego.
MOYERS: And ecstasy is a part of it.
CAMPBELL: It iS.
MOYERS: The trance dance, for example, in the Bushman society.
CAMPBELL: Now, there’s a fantastic example of something. The Bushmen live in a desert world. It’s a very hard life, a life of great, great tension. The male and female sexes are, in a disciplined way, separate. Only in the dance do the two come together. And they come together this way. The women sit in a circle or in a little group and beat their thighs, setting a pace for the men dancing around them. The women are the center around which the men dance. And they control the dance and what goes on with the men through their own singing and beating of the thighs.
MOYERS: What’s the significance, that the woman is controlling the dance?
CAMPBELL: Well, the woman is life, and the man is the servant of life. That’s the basic idea in these things. During the course of the circling, which they do all night long, one of the men will suddenly pass out. He experiences