The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [89]
CAMPBELL: When you choose your vocation, you have actually chosen a model, and it will fit you in a little while. After middle life, for example, you can pretty well tell what a person’s profession is. Wherever I go, people know I’m a professor. I don’t know what it is that I do, or how I look, but I, too, can tell professors from engineers and merchants. You’re shaped by your life.
MOYERS: There is a wonderful image in King Arthur where the knights of the Round Table are about to enter the search for the Grail in the Dark Forest, and the narrator says, “They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. So each entered the forest at a separate point of his choice.” You’ve interpreted that to express the Western emphasis upon the unique phenomenon of a single human life—the individual confronting darkness.
CAMPBELL: What struck me when I read that in the thirteenth-century Queste del Saint Graal was that it epitomizes an especially Western spiritual aim and ideal, which is, of living the life that is potential in you and was never in anyone else as a possibility.
This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s. In the traditional Orient, on the other hand, and generally in all traditionally grounded societies, the individual is cookie-molded. His duties are put upon him in exact and precise terms, and there’s no way of breaking out from them. When you go to a guru to be guided on the spiritual way, he knows just where you are on the traditional path, just where you have to go next, just what you must do to get there. He’ll give you his picture to wear, so you can be like him. That wouldn’t be a proper Western pedagogical way of guidance. We have to give our students guidance in developing their own pictures of themselves. What each must seek in his life never was, on land or sea. It is to be something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.
MOYERS: There’s the question Hamlet asked, “Are you up to your destiny?”
CAMPBELL: Hamlet’s problem was that he wasn’t. He was given a destiny too big for him to handle, and it blew him to pieces. That can happen, too.
MOYERS: Which stories from mythology help us understand death?
CAMPBELL: You don’t understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death. I would say that the story of Christ assuming the form of a human servant, even to death on the cross, is the principal lesson for us of the acceptance of death. The story of Oedipus and the Sphinx has something to say of this, too. The Sphinx in the Oedipus story is not the Egyptian Sphinx, but a female form with the wings of a bird, the body of an animal, and the breast, neck, and face of a woman. What she represents is the destiny of all life. She has sent a plague over the land, and to lift the plague, the hero has to answer the riddle that she presents: “What is it that walks on four legs, then on two legs, and then on three?” The answer is “Man.” The child creeps about on four legs, the adult walks on two, and the aged walk with a cane.
The riddle of the Sphinx is the image of life itself through time—childhood, maturity, age, and death. When without fear you have faced and accepted the riddle of the Sphinx, death has no further hold on you, and the curse of the Sphinx disappears. The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life hut as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure—fearlessness and achievement.
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