The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [57]
MOYERS: And the purpose of all this?
CAMPBELL: To claim the land. To turn the land where they lived into a place of spiritual relevance.
MOYERS: So when Moses looked out on the Promised Land, he was simply doing what other spiritual leaders had done for their own people. He was claiming that land.
CAMPBELL: Yes. You remember the story of Jacob’s dream. When Jacob awakes, the place becomes Bethel, the house of God. Jacob has claimed that place with a certain spiritual significance. This is the place where God sowed his energies.
MOYERS: Do sacred sites still exist on this continent today?
CAMPBELL: Mexico City was a sacred site, one of the great cities in the world before the Spanish tore it apart. When the Spanish first saw Mexico City, or Tenochtitlán, it was a greater city than any city in Europe. And it was a sacred city, with great temples. Now the Catholic cathedral is right where the temple of the sun used to be. That’s an example of land-claiming by the Christians. You see, they are transforming the same landscape into their landscape by putting their temple where the other temple was.
Our Pilgrim fathers, for example, named sites after biblical centers. And somebody in upper New York State had the Odyssey and Iliad in his mind—Ithaca, Utica, and one classical name after another.
MOYERS: In a sense, people are anointing the land where they believe there is energy which empowers them. There is an organic relationship between the land and the structures people build upon it.
CAMPBELL: Yes, but that ended with the coming of the metropolis.
MOYERS: In New York now, the competition is over who can build the tallest building.
CAMPBELL: This is a kind of architectural triumph. It is the statement of the city that we are a financial power center, and look what we can do. It is a kind of virtuoso acrobatic stunt.
MOYERS: Where are the sacred places today?
CAMPBELL: They don’t exist. There are a few historical spots where people may go to think about something important that happened there. For example, we may go visit the Holy Land, because that’s the land of our religious origins. But every land should be a holy land. One should find the symbol in the landscape itself of the energies of the life there. That’s what all early traditions do. They sanctify their own landscape.
That’s what the early settlers of Iceland did, for example, in the eighth and ninth centuries. They established their different settlements in a relationship of 432,000 Roman feet to each other (432,000 is an important mythological number known to many traditions). The whole organization of the Icelandic landscape was in terms of such cosmic relationships, so that wherever you go in Iceland, you are, so to say (if you know your mythology), in accord with the universe. This is the same kind of mythology that you have in Egypt, but in Egypt the symbology took a different shape because Egypt is not circular, Egypt is long. So there you have the sky goddess as a Sacred Cow, two feet in the south and two feet in the north—a rectangular idea, so to speak. But the spiritual symbolization of our own civilization is basically lost to us. That’s why it’s so wonderful to go to the lovely little French town of Chartres where the cathedral still dominates, and you hear the bells ring when night turns to day, and when morning turns to noon, and again when day turns to night.
I consider Chartres my parish. I’ve been there often. When I was a student in Paris, I spent