The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [76]
MOYERS: So the hero goes for something, he doesn’t just go along for the ride, he’s not simply an adventurer?
CAMPBELL: There are both kinds of heroes, some that choose to undertake the journey and some that don’t. In one kind of adventure, the hero sets out responsibly and intentionally to perform the deed. For instance, Odysseus’ son Telemachus was told by Athena, “Go find your father.” That father quest is a major hero adventure for young people. That is the adventure of finding what your career is, what your nature is, what your source is. You undertake that intentionally. Or there is the legend of the Sumerian sky goddess, Inanna, who descended into the underworld and underwent death to bring her beloved back to life.
Then there are adventures into which you are thrown—for example, being drafted into the army. You didn’t intend it, but you’re in now. You’ve undergone a death and resurrection, you’ve put on a uniform, and you’re another creature.
One kind of hero that often appears in Celtic myths is the princely hunter, who has followed the lure of a deer into a range of forest that he has never been in before. The animal there undergoes a transformation, becoming the Queen of the Faerie Hills, or something of that kind. This is a type of adventure in which the hero has no idea what he is doing but suddenly finds himself in a transformed realm.
MOYERS: Is the adventurer who takes that kind of trip a hero in the mythological sense?
CAMPBELL: Yes, because he is always ready for it. In these stories, the adventure that the hero is ready for is the one he gets. The adventure is symbolically a manifestation of his character. Even the landscape and the conditions of the environment match his readiness.
MOYERS: In George Lucas’ Star Wars, Solo begins as a mercenary and ends up a hero, coming in at the last to save Luke Skywalker.
CAMPBELL: Yes. There Solo has done the hero act of sacrificing himself for another.
MOYERS: Do you think that a hero is created out of guilt? Was Solo guilty because he had abandoned Skywalker?
CAMPBELL: It depends on what system of ideas you want to apply. Solo was a very practical guy, at least as he thought of himself, a materialist. But he was a compassionate human being at the same time and didn’t know it. The adventure evoked a quality of his character that he hadn’t known he possessed.
MOYERS: So perhaps the hero lurks in each one of us when we don’t know it?
CAMPBELL: Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That’s why it’s good to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower. “Lead us not into temptation.”
Ortega y Gasset talks about the environment and the hero in his Meditations on Don Quixote. Don Quixote was the last hero of the Middle Ages. He rode out to encounter giants, but instead of giants, his environment produced windmills. Ortega points out that this story takes place about the time that a mechanistic interpretation of the world came in, so that the environment was no longer spiritually responsive to the hero. The hero is today running up against a hard world that is in no way responsive to his spiritual need.
MOYERS: A windmill.
CAMPBELL: Yes, but Quixote saved the adventure for himself by inventing a magician who had just transformed the giants he had gone forth to encounter into windmills. You can do that, too, if you have a poetic imagination. Earlier, though, it was not a mechanistic world in which the hero moved but a world alive and responsive to his spiritual readiness.