The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [78]
MOYERS: One of the intriguing points of your scholarship is that you do not believe science and mythology conflict.
CAMPBELL: No, they don’t conflict. Science is breaking through now into the mystery dimensions. It’s pushed itself into the sphere the myth is talking about. It’s come to the edge.
MOYERS: The edge being—
CAMPBELL: —the edge, the interface between what can be known and what is never to be discovered because it is a mystery that transcends all human research. The source of life—what is it? No one knows. We don’t even know what an atom is, whether it is a wave or a particle—it is both. We don’t have any idea of what these things are.
That’s the reason we speak of the divine. There’s a transcendent energy source. When the physicist observes subatomic particles, he’s seeing a trace on a screen. These traces come and go, come and go, and we come and go, and all of life comes and goes. That energy is the informing energy of all things. Mythic worship is addressed to that.
MOYERS: Do you have a favorite mythic hero?
CAMPBELL: When I was a boy, I had two heroes. One was Douglas Fairbanks; the other was Leonardo da Vinci. I wanted to be a synthesis of the two. Today, I don’t have a single hero at all.
MOYERS: Does our society?
CAMPBELL: It did have. It had the Christ. And then America had men like Washington and Jefferson and, later, men like Daniel Boone. But life today is so complex, and it is changing so fast, that there is no time for anything to constellate itself before it’s thrown over again.
MOYERS: We seem to worship celebrities today, not heroes.
CAMPBELL: Yes, and that’s too bad. A questionnaire was once sent around one of the high schools in Brooklyn which asked, “What would you like to be?” Two thirds of the students responded, “A celebrity.” They had no notion of having to give of themselves in order to achieve something.
MOYERS: Just to be known.
CAMPBELL: Just to be known, to have fame—name and fame. It’s too bad.
MOYERS: But does a society need heroes?
CAMPBELL: Yes, I think so.
MOYERS: Why?
CAMPBELL: Because it has to have constellating images to pull together all these tendencies to separation, to pull them together into some intention.
MOYERS: To follow some path.
CAMPBELL: I think so. The nation has to have an intention somehow to operate as a single power.
MOYERS: What did you think of the outpouring over John Lennon’s death? Was he a hero?
CAMPBELL: Oh, he definitely was a hero.
MOYERS: Explain that in the mythological sense.
CAMPBELL: In the mythological sense, he was an innovator. The Beatles brought forth an art form for which there was a readiness. Somehow, they were in perfect tune with their time. Had they turned up thirty years before, their music would have fizzled out. The public hero is sensitive to the needs of his time. The Beatles brought a new spiritual depth into popular music which started the fad, let’s call it, for meditation and Oriental music. Oriental music had been over here for years, as a curiosity, but now, after the Beatles, our young people seem to know what it’s about. We are hearing more and more of it, and it’s being used in terms of its original intention as a support for meditations. That’s what the Beatles started.
MOYERS: Sometimes it seems to me that we ought to feel pity for the hero instead of admiration. So many of them have sacrificed their own needs for others.
CAMPBELL: They all have.
MOYERS: And very often what they accomplish is shattered by the inability of the followers to see.
CAMPBELL: Yes, you come out of the forest with gold and it turns to ashes. That’s a well-known fairy-tale motif.
MOYERS: There’s that haunting incident in the story of Odysseus, when the ship tears apart and the members of the crew are thrown overboard, and the waves