The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [61]
MOYERS: Geography has done a great deal to shape our culture and our idea of religion. The god of the desert is not the god of the plains—
CAMPBELL: —or the god of the rain forest—the gods, plural, of the rain forest. When you’re out in the desert with one sky and one world, then you might have one deity, but in a jungle, where there’s no horizon and you never see anything more than ten or twelve yards away from you, you don’t have that idea anymore.
MOYERS: So are they projecting their idea of God on the world?
CAMPBELL: Yes, of course.
MOYERS: Their geography shapes their image of divinity, and then they project it out and call it God.
CAMPBELL: Yes. The god idea is always culturally conditioned, always. And even when a missionary brings what he thinks is God, his god, that god is transformed in terms of what the people are able to think of as a divinity.
There is an amusing story about a British missionary in Hawaii who was paid a visit by a priestess of the goddess Pele. Now, a priestess of Pele would be, in a sense, a minor incarnation of Pele herself. So the missionary was actually talking to a goddess there. He said, “I have come to bring you the message of God.” And the priestess said, “Oh, that’s your god, Pele’s mine.”
MOYERS: Is the idea “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” purely a Hebraic idea?
CAMPBELL: I’ve not found it anywhere else.
MOYERS: Why only one god?
CAMPBELL: This I do not understand. I do understand the accent on the local social deity for people who are living in a desert. Your whole commitment is to the society which is protecting you. Society is always patriarchal. Nature is always matrilineal.
MOYERS; Do you think goddess religions emerged because in the domestication of the human race women played such a dominant role in the planting and harvesting activities of those early societies?
CAMPBELL: There is no doubt about it. At that moment, the women become the most important members of the society in terms of magic power.
MOYERS: It had been the man hunting—
CAMPBELL: Yes, and now it moves over into the woman. Since her magic is that of giving birth and nourishment, as the earth does, her magic supports the magic of the earth. In the early tradition, she is the first planter. It is only later, when the plow is invented in the high culture systems, that the male takes over the agricultural lead again. And then the simulation of coitus, with the plow plowing the earth, becomes a dominant myth figure.
MOYERS: So these differing approaches to myth are what you mean by the “way of the animal powers,” the “way of the seeded earth,” the “way of the celestial lights,” and the “way of man.”
CAMPBELL: These have to do with the symbolic system through which the normal human condition of the time is symbolized and organized and given knowledge of itself.
MOYERS: And what it values?
CAMPBELL: The values will be a result of the conditions that govern life. For instance, the hunter is always directed outward to the animal. His life depends on the relationship to the animals. His mythology is outward turned. But the planting mythology, which has to do with the cultivation of the plant, the planting of the seed, the death of the seed, so to say, and the coming of the new plant, is more inward turned. With the hunters, the animals inspired the mythology. When a man wanted to gain power and knowledge, he would go into the forest and fast and pray, and an animal would come and teach him.
With the planters, the plant world is the teacher. The plant world is identical in its life sequences with the life of man. So you see, there’s an inward relationship there.
MOYERS: What happened to the mythic imagination as human beings turned from the hunting of animals to the planting of seeds?
CAMPBELL: