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By Root 1237 0

one whole weekend in the cathedral, studying every single figure there. I was there so much that the concierge came up to me one noontime and said, “Would you like to go up with me and ring the bells?” I said, “I sure would.” So we climbed the tower up to the great bronze bell. There was a little platform like a seesaw. He stood on one end of the seesaw, and I stood on the other end of the seesaw, and there was a little bar there for us to hold on to. He gave the thing a push, and then he was on it, and I was on it. And we started going up and down, and the wind was blowing through our hair, up there in the cathedral, and then it began ringing underneath us—“Bong, bong, bong.” It was one of the most thrilling adventures of my life.

When it was all over, he brought me down, and he said, “I want to show you where my room is.” Well, in a cathedral you have the nave, then the transept, and then the apse, and around the apse is the choir screen. He took me through a little door in the middle of the choir screen, and there was his little bed and a little table with a lamp on it. When I looked out through the screen, there was the window of the Black Madonna—and that was where he lived. Now, there was a man living by constant meditation. That was a very moving, beautiful thing. I’ve been to Chartres time and time again since.

MOYERS: And what do you find there?

CAMPBELL: It takes me back to a time when these spiritual principles informed the society. You can tell what’s informing a society by what the tallest building is. When you approach a medieval town, the cathedral is the tallest thing in the place. When you approach an eighteenth-century town, it is the political palace that’s the tallest thing in the place. And when you approach a modern city, the tallest places are the office buildings, the centers of economic life.

If you go to Salt Lake City, you see the whole thing illustrated right in front of your face. First the temple was built, right in the center of the city. This is the proper organization because the temple is the spiritual center from which everything flows in all directions. Then the political building, the Capitol, was built beside it, and it’s taller than the temple. And now the tallest thing is the office building that takes care of the affairs of both the temple and the political building. That’s the history of Western civilization. From the Gothic through the princely periods of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth centuries, to this economic world that we’re in now.

MOYERS: So when you go to Chartres—

CAMPBELL: —I’m back in the Middle Ages. I’m back in the world that I was brought up in as a child, the Roman Catholic spiritual-image world, and it is magnificent.

MOYERS: You’re not a man who swims long in nostalgia. It’s not just the past that moves you when you go there, is it?

CAMPBELL: No, it’s the present. That cathedral talks to me about the spiritual information of the world. It’s a place for meditation, just walking around, just sitting, just looking at those beautiful things.

MOYERS: The cathedral at Chartres which you love so much also expresses a relationship of the human to the cosmos, doesn’t it?

CAMPBELL: Yes. The cathedral is in the form of a cross, with the altar in the middle there. It’s a symbolic structure. Now many churches are built as though they were theaters. Visibility is important. In the cathedral, there is no interest in visibility at all. Most of what goes on goes on out of your sight. But the symbol is what’s important there, not just watching the show. Everybody knows the show by heart. You’ve seen it ever since you were a six-year-old child.

MOYERS: Why keep going to the cathedral, then?

CAMPBELL: That’s the whole business of myth. Why do we like to talk about these things again? Because it puts us back in touch with the essential archetypology of our spiritual life. Going through a ritual day after day keeps you on the line.

MOYERS: But we don’t do that now.

CAMPBELL: We’ve lost touch with that kind of concern. The goal of early life was to live in constant