The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [9]
MOYERS: So marriage is utterly incompatible with the idea of doing one’s own thing.
CAMPBELL: It’s not simply one’s own thing, you see. It is, in a sense, doing one’s own thing, but the one isn’t just you, it’s the two together as one. And that’s a purely mythological image signifying the sacrifice of the visible entity for a transcendent good. This is something that becomes beautifully realized in the second stage of marriage, what I call the alchemical stage, of the two experiencing that they are one. If they are still living as they were in the primary stage of marriage, they will go apart when their children leave. Daddy will fall in love with some little nubile girl and run off, and Mother will be left with an empty house and heart, and will have to work it out on her own, in her own way.
MOYERS: That’s because we don’t understand the two levels of marriage.
CAMPBELL: You don’t make a commitment.
MOYERS: We presume to—we make a commitment for better or for worse.
CAMPBELL: That’s the remnant of a ritual.
MOYERS: And the ritual has lost its force. The ritual that once conveyed an inner reality is now merely form. And that’s true in the rituals of society and in the personal rituals of marriage and religion.
CAMPBELL: How many people before marriage receive spiritual instruction as to what the marriage means? You can stand up in front of a judge and in ten minutes get married. The marriage ceremony in India lasts three days. That couple is glued.
MOYERS: You’re saying that marriage is not just a social arrangement, it’s a spiritual exercise.
CAMPBELL: It’s primarily a spiritual exercise, and the society is supposed to help us have the realization. Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that’s what is threatening the world at this minute.
MOYERS: What happens when a society no longer embraces a powerful mythology?
CAMPBELL: What we’ve got on our hands. If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.
MOYERS: And you’d find?
CAMPBELL: The news of the day, including destructive and violent acts by young people who don’t know how to behave in a civilized society.
MOYERS: Society has provided them no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind. I think of that passage in the first book of Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
CAMPBELL: That’s exactly it. That’s the significance of the puberty rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done. So you don’t have your little baby body anymore, you’re something else entirely.
When I was a kid, we wore short trousers, you know, knee pants. And then there was a great moment when you put on long pants. Boys now don’t get that. I see even five-year-olds walking around with long trousers. When are they going to know that they’re now men and must put aside childish things?
MOYERS: Where do the kids growing up in the city—on 125th and Broadway, for example—where do these kids get their myths today?
CAMPBELL: They make them up themselves. This is why we have graffiti all over the city. These kids have their own gangs and their own initiations and their own morality, and they’re doing