• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1182 0

mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. This realization of life can be a constant realization in your living. When you find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done. Don’t say, “Oh, I want to know what So-and-so did”—and don’t bother at all with the best-seller list. Just read what this one author has to give you. And then you can go read what he had read. And the world opens up in a way that is consistent with a certain point of view. But when you go from one author to another, you may be able to tell us the date when each wrote such and such a poem—but he hasn’t said anything to you.

MOYERS: So shamans functioned in early societies as artists do now. They play a much more important role than simply being—

CAMPBELL: They played the role the priesthood traditionally plays in our society.

MOYERS: Then shamans were priests?

CAMPBELL: There’s a major difference, as I see it, between a shaman and a priest. A priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry out that ritual. The deity to whom he is devoted is a deity that was there before he came along. But the shaman’s powers are symbolized in his own familiars, deities of his own personal experience. His authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination.

MOYERS: The shaman has been somewhere I haven’t, and he explains it to me.

CAMPBELL: Also, as in the case of Black Elk, the shaman may translate some of his visions into ritual performances for his people. That’s bringing the inner experience into the outer life of the people themselves.

MOYERS: This was the beginning of a religion?

CAMPBELL: Personally, I think that’s how religions began. But that’s just a guess. We don’t really know.

MOYERS: A Jesus goes into the wilderness, experiences a psychological transformation, comes back, and says to people, “Follow me.” And this happens in these elementary cultures?

CAMPBELL: That’s the evidence we have. We find a shamanic aspect in practically all the hunting cultures.

MOYERS: Why, particularly, in the hunting cultures?

CAMPBELL: Because they’re individual. The hunter is an individual in a way that no farmer will ever be. Toiling in the fields and waiting for nature to tell you when you’re going to do it is one thing, but going off on a hunt—every hunt is a different hunt from the last one. And the hunters are trained in individual skills that require very special talents and abilities.

MOYERS: So what happened to the shaman in human evolution?

CAMPBELL: When this big emphasis came on the settled village life, the shaman lost power. In fact, there’s a wonderful set of stories and myths of some of the Southwestern American Indians, the Navaho and Apache, who were originally hunting peoples who came down into an area where agriculture had been developed and took on an agricultural system of life. In their stories of the beginnings, there is typically an amusing episode where the shamans are disgraced and the priests take over. The shamans say something that offends the sun, and the sun disappears, and then they say, “Oh, I can bring the sun back.” Then they do all their tricks, and these are cynically, comically described. But their tricks don’t bring the sun back. The shamans are reduced, then, to a shaman society, a kind of clown society. They are magicians of a special power, but their power is now subordinate to a larger society.

MOYERS: We talked about the effect of the hunting plain on mythology, this space clearly bounded by a circular horizon with the great dome of heaven above. But what about the people who lived in the dense foliage of the jungle? There’s no dome of the sky, no horizon, no sense of perspective—just trees, trees, trees.

CAMPBELL: Colin Turnbull tells an interesting story of bringing a pygmy who had never been out of the forest onto a mountaintop. Suddenly they came from the trees onto the hill, and there was an extensive plain stretching