The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [79]
CAMPBELL: Well, that adventure of Odysseus is a little complicated to try to talk about very briefly. But that particular adventure where the ship is wrecked is at the Island of the Sun—that’s the island of highest illumination. If the ship had not been wrecked, Odysseus might have remained on the island and become, you might say, the sort of yogi who, on achieving full enlightenment, remains there in bliss and never returns. But the Greek idea of making the values known and enacted in life brings him back. Now, there was a taboo on the Island of the Sun, namely, that one should not kill and eat any of the oxen of the Sun. Odysseus’ men, however, were hungry, so they slaughtered the cattle of the Sun, which is what brought about their shipwreck. The lower consciousness was still functioning while they were up there in the sphere of the highest spiritual light. When you’re in the presence of such an illumination, you are not to think, “Gee, I’m hungry. Get me a roast beef sandwich.” Odysseus’ men were not ready or eligible for the experience which had been given to them.
That’s a model story of the earthly hero’s attaining to the highest illumination but then coming back.
MOYERS: What are we to make of what you wrote of the bittersweet story of Odysseus when you said, “The tragic sense of that work lies precisely in its deep joy in life’s beauty and excellence—the noble loveliness of fair woman, the real worth of manly men. Yet the end of the tale is ashes.”
CAMPBELL: You can’t say life is useless because it ends in the grave. There’s an inspiring line in one of Pindar’s poems where he is celebrating a young man who has just won a wrestling championship at the Pythian games. Pindar writes, “Creatures of a day, what is any one? What is he not? Man is but a dream of a shadow. Yet when there comes as a gift of heaven a gleam of sunshine, there rests upon men a radiant light and, aye, a gentle life.” That dismal saying, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!”—it is not all vanity. This moment itself is no vanity, it is a triumph, a delight. This accent on the culmination of perfection in our moments of triumph is very Greek.
MOYERS: Don’t many of the heroes in mythology die to the world? They suffer, they’re crucified.
CAMPBELL: Many of them give their lives. But then the myth also says that out of the given life comes a new life. It may not be the hero’s life, but it’s a new life, a new way of being or becoming.
MOYERS: These stories of the hero vary from culture to culture. Is the hero from the East different from the hero in our culture?
CAMPBELL: It’s the degree of the illumination or action that makes them different. There is a typical early culture hero who goes around slaying monsters. Now, that is a form of adventure from the period of prehistory when man was shaping his world out of a dangerous, unshaped wilderness. He goes about killing monsters.
MOYERS: So the hero evolves over time like most other concepts and ideas?
CAMPBELL: He evolves as the culture evolves. Moses is a hero figure, for example. He ascends the mountain, he meets with Yahweh on the summit of the mountain, and he comes back with rules for the formation of a whole new society. That’s a typical hero act—departure, fulfillment, return.
MOYERS; Is Buddha a hero figure?
CAMPBELL: The Buddha follows a path very much like that of Christ; only of course the Buddha lived five hundred years earlier. You can match those two savior figures right down the line, even to the roles and characters of their immediate disciples or apostles. You can parallel, for example, Ananda and St. Peter.
MOYERS: Why did you call your book The Hero with a Thousand Faces?
CAMPBELL: Because there is a certain typical hero sequence of actions which can be detected in stories from all over the world and from many periods of history. Essentially, it might even be said there is but one archetypal mythic hero whose life has been replicated in many lands by many,