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By Root 1231 0

Jesuit missionaries in eastern Canada of a young Iroquois brave who has just been captured by an enemy tribe. He is being brought to be tortured to death. The Northeastern Indians had a custom of systematic torture of their male captives. The ordeal was to be suffered without flinching. That was the final test of real manhood. And so this young Iroquois is being brought in to endure this horrible ordeal; but, to the Jesuits’ amazement, it is as though he were coming to celebrate his wedding. He is decorated and loudly singing. His captors are treating him as though they were his welcoming hosts and he their honored guest. And he is playing the game along with them, knowing all the while to what end he is being conducted. The French priests describing the occasion are simply appalled by what they interpret as the heartless mockery of such a reception, characterizing the youth’s captors as a company of savage brutes. But no! Those people were to be the young brave’s sacrificial priests. This was to be a sacrifice of the altar and, by analogy, that boy was the like of Jesus. The French priests themselves, every day, were celebrating Mass, which is a replication of the brutal sacrifice of the cross.

There is an equivalent scene described in the apocryphal Christian Acts of John, immediately before Jesus goes to be crucified. This is one of the most moving passages in Christian literature. In the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John gospels, it is simply mentioned that, at the conclusion of the celebration of the Last Supper, Jesus and his disciples sang a hymn before he went forth. But in the Acts of John, we have a word-for-word account of the whole singing of the hymn. Just before going out into the garden at the end of the Last Supper, Jesus says to the company, “Let us dance!” And they all hold hands in a circle, and as they circle around him, Jesus sings, “Glory be to thee, Father!”

To which the circling company responds, “Amen.”

“Glory be to thee, Word!”

And again, “Amen.”

“I would be born and I would bear!”

“Amen.”

“I would eat and I would be eaten!”

“Amen.”

“Thou that dancest, see what I do, for thine is this passion of the manhood, which I am about to suffer!”

“Amen.”

“I would flee and I would stay!”

“Amen.”

“I would be united and I would unite!”

“Amen.”

“A door am I to thee that knocketh at me.… A way am I to thee, a wayfarer.” And when the dance is ended, he walks out into the garden to be taken and crucified.

When you go to your death that way, as a god, in the knowledge of the myth, you are going to your eternal life. So what is there in that to be sad about? Let us make it magnificent—as it is. Let us celebrate it.

MOYERS: The god of death is the lord of the dance.

CAMPBELL: The god of death is at the same time the lord of sex.

MOYERS: What do you mean?

CAMPBELL: It’s amazing: one after another, you discover these gods who are at once of death and of generation. The death god, Ghede, of the Haitian Voodoo tradition, is also the sex god. The Egyptian god Osiris was the judge and lord of the dead, and the lord of the regeneration of life. It is a basic theme—that which dies is born. You have to have death in order to have life.

This is the origin of the head hunt in Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia. The head hunt is a sacred act, a sacred killing. Before a young man can be permitted to marry and become a father, he must go forth and have his kill. Unless there is death, there cannot be birth. The significance of that is that every generation has to die in order that the next generation can come. As soon as you beget or give birth to a child, you are the dead one. The child is the new life, and you are simply the protector of that new life.

MOYERS: Your time has come.

CAMPBELL: That is why there is the deep psychological association of begetting and dying.

MOYERS: Is there some relationship between what you are saying and the fact that a parent will give his or her life for a child?

CAMPBELL: There is a magnificent essay by Schopenhauer in which he asks, how is it that a human being can so