The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [83]
MOYERS: In each case receivers of the boon have done some rather grotesque things with their interpretation of the hero’s message.
CAMPBELL: There are some teachers who decide they won’t teach at all because of what society will do with what they’ve found.
MOYERS: What if the hero returns from his ordeal, and the world doesn’t want what he brings back?
CAMPBELL: That, of course, is a normal experience. It isn’t always so much that the world doesn’t want the gift, but that it doesn’t know how to receive it and how to institutionalize it—
MOYERS: —how to keep it, how to renew it.
CAMPBELL: Yes, how to help keep it going.
MOYERS: I’ve always liked that image of life being breathed back into the dry bones, back into the ruins and the relics.
CAMPBELL: There is a kind of secondary hero to revitalize the tradition. This hero reinterprets the tradition and makes it valid as a living experience today instead of a lot of outdated clichés. This has to be done with all traditions.
MOYERS: So many of the religions began with their own hero stories. The whole of the Orient has been blessed with the teaching of the good law brought back by Buddha, and the Occident has been blessed by the laws Moses brought back from Sinai. The tribal or local heroes perform their deeds for a single folk, and universal heroes like Mohammed, Jesus, and Buddha bring the message from afar. These heroes of religion came back with the wonder of God, not with a blueprint of God,
CAMPBELL: Well, you find an awful lot of laws in the Old Testament.
MOYERS: But that’s the transformation of religion to theology. Religion begins with the sense of wonder and awe and the attempt to tell stories that will connect us to God. Then it becomes a set of theological works in which everything is reduced to a code, to a creed.
CAMPBELL: That’s the reduction of mythology to theology. Mythology is very fluid. Most of the myths are self-contradictory. You may even find four or five myths in a given culture, all giving different versions of the same mystery. Then theology comes along and says it has got to be just this way. Mythology is poetry, and the poetic language is very flexible.
Religion turns poetry into prose. God is literally up there, and this is literally what he thinks, and this is the way you’ve got to behave to get into proper relationship with that god up there.
MOYERS: You don’t have to believe that there was a King Arthur to get the significance of those stories, but Christians say we have to believe there was a Christ, or the miracles don’t make sense.
CAMPBELL: They are the same miracles that Elijah performed. There’s a whole body of miracles that float, like particles in the air, and a man of a certain type of achievement comes along, and all these things cluster around him. These stories of miracles let us know simply that this remarkable man preached of a spiritual order that is not to be identified with the merely physical order, so he could perform spiritual magic. It doesn’t follow that he actually did any of these things, although of course it’s possible. Three or four times I’ve seen what appear to be magical effects occur: men and women of power can do things that you wouldn’t think possible. We don’t really know what the limits of the possible might be. But the miracles of legend need not necessarily have been facts. The Buddha walked on water, as did Jesus. The Buddha ascended to heaven and returned.
MOYERS: I remember a lecture in which you drew a circle, and you said, “That’s your soul.”
CAMPBELL: Well, that was simply a pedagogical stunt. Plato has said somewhere that the soul is a circle. I took this idea to suggest on the blackboard the whole sphere of the psyche. Then I drew a horizontal line across the circle to represent the line of separation of the conscious and unconscious. The center from which all our energy comes I represented as a dot in the center of the circle,