The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [62]
Another idea associated with the tropical forests is that out of rot comes life. I have seen wonderful redwood forests with great, huge stumps from enormous trees that were cut down decades ago. Out of them are coming these bright new little children who are part of the same plant. Also, if you cut off the limb of a plant, another one comes. Tear off the limb of an animal, and unless it is a certain kind of lizard, it doesn’t grow again.
So in the forest and planting cultures, there is a sense of death as not death somehow, that death is required for new life. And the individual isn’t quite an individual, he is a branch of a plant. Jesus uses this image when he says, “I am the vine, and you are the branches.” That vineyard image is a totally different one from the separate animals. When you have a planting culture, there is a fostering of the plant that is going to be eaten.
MOYERS: What stories did this experience of the planter inspire?
CAMPBELL: The motif of the plants that you eat having grown from the cut-up and buried body of a sacrificed deity or ancestral personage occurs all over the place, but particularly in the Pacific cultures.
These plant stories actually penetrate what we normally think of as a hunting area in the Americas. The North American culture is a very strong example of the interaction of hunting and planting cultures. The Indians were chiefly hunters, but they were also growing maize. One Algonquin story about the origin of maize tells of a boy who has a vision. In this vision, he sees a young man who comes to him with green plumes on his head and who invites the boy to a wrestling match. He wins and comes again and wins again, and so on. But one day the young man tells the boy that next time the boy must kill him and bury him and take care of the place where he has been buried. The boy then does what he has been told to do, and kills and buries the beautiful youth. In time, the boy returns and sees the corn growing where the plumed young man has been buried, or planted, you might say.
Now, this boy had been concerned for his father, who was a hunter but old. The boy was wondering whether there might be some other way to get food besides hunting. The vision came to him out of his intention. And the boy says to his father at the end of the tale, “We no longer need to go out hunting now.” That must have been a moment of great awakening for these people.
MOYERS: But the idea is that the plumed man in the vision has to die and be buried before the plant can grow from the remains of his body. Does that story run through one myth after another in the planting cultures?
CAMPBELL: It does. A duplicate of this story comes up throughout Polynesia, for instance. There is a girl who loves to bathe in a certain pool. A great eel is also swimming around in the pool, and day after day he scrapes across her thigh as she is bathing. Then one fine day he turns into a young man and becomes her lover for a moment. Then he goes away and comes back again, and goes away and comes back again. But one time when he comes, he says, just as the plumed man in the Algonquin story had said, “Now, next time I come to visit you, you must kill me, cut off my head, and bury it.” She does so, and there grows from the buried head a coconut tree. And when you pick a coconut, you can see it is just the size of a head. You can even see eyes and the little nodules that simulate the head. If we are to believe what most of our American anthropologists tell us, there is no connection between the Pacific cultures and the cultures of middle America from which our planting myths have come.
MOYERS: So we have the same story