The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [55]
Well, what happened with this young boy was that he had a prophetic vision of the terrible future of his tribe. It was a vision of what he called “the hoop” of the nation. In the vision, Black Elk saw that the hoop of his nation was one of many hoops, which is something that we haven’t learned at all well yet. He saw the cooperation of all the hoops, all the nations in grand procession. But more than that, the vision was an experience of himself as going through the realms of spiritual imagery that were of his culture and assimilating their import. It comes to one great statement, which for me is a key statement to the understanding of myth and symbols. He says, “I saw myself on the central mountain of the world, the highest place, and I had a vision because I was seeing in the sacred manner of the world.” And the sacred central mountain was Harney Peak in South Dakota. And then he says, “But the central mountain is everywhere.”
That is a real mythological realization. It distinguishes between the local cult image, Harney Peak, and its connotation as the center of the world. The center of the world is the axis mundi, the central point, the pole around which all revolves. The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, but stillness is eternity. Realizing how this moment of your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the temporal experience—this is the mythological experience.
So is the central mountain of the world Jerusalem? Rome? Benares? Lhasa? Mexico City?
MOYERS: This Indian boy was saying there is a shining point where all lines intersect.
CAMPBELL: That’s exactly what he was saying.
MOYERS: And he was saying God has no circumference?
CAMPBELL: There is a definition of God which has been repeated by many philosophers. God is an intelligible sphere—a sphere known to the mind, not to the senses—whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. And the center, Bill, is right where you’re sitting. And the other one is right where I’m sitting. And each of us is a manifestation of that mystery. That’s a nice mythological realization that sort of gives you a sense of who and what you are.
MOYERS: So it’s a metaphor, an image of reality.
CAMPBELL: Yes. What you have here is what might be translated into raw individualism, you see, if you didn’t realize that the center was also right there facing you in the other person. This is the mythological way of being an individual. You are the central mountain, and the central mountain is everywhere.
IV
SACRIFICE
AND BLISS
If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.
MOYERS: What impresses me as I read what you have written about the impact of the environment on storytelling is that these people—the people on the plains, the hunters, the people in the forest, the planters—are participating in their landscape. They are part of their world, and every feature of their world becomes sacred to them.
CAMPBELL: The sanctification of the local landscape is a fundamental function of mythology. You can see this very clearly with the Navaho, who will identify a northern mountain, a southern mountain, an eastern mountain, a western mountain, and a central mountain. In a Navaho hogan,