The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [93]
Another American Indian motif involves a mother and two little boys. The mother says, “You can play around the houses, but don’t go north.” So they go north. There’s the adventurer.
MOYERS: And the point?
CAMPBELL: With the refusal of suitors, of the passing over a boundary, the adventure begins. You get into a field that’s unprotected, novel. You can’t have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.
Now, there’s an Iroquois story that illustrates the motif of the rejection of suitors. A girl lived with her mother in a wigwam on the edge of a village. She was a very beautiful girl but extremely proud and would not accept any of the boys. The mother was terribly annoyed with her.
One day they’re out collecting wood quite a long way from the village and, while they are out, an ominous darkness comes down over them. Now, this wasn’t the dark of night descending. When you have a darkness of this kind, there’s a magician at work somewhere behind it. So the mother says, “Let’s gather some bark and make a little wigwam for ourselves and collect wood for a fire, and we’ll just spend the night here.”
So they do exactly that and prepare a little supper, and the mother falls asleep. Suddenly the girl looks up, and there is a magnificent young man standing there before her with a wampum sash, glorious black feathers—a very handsome fellow. He says, “I’ve come to marry you, and I’ll await your reply.”
And she says, “I have to consult with my mother.”
She does so, the mother accepts the young man, and he gives the mother the wampum belt to prove he’s serious about the proposal. Then he says to the girl, “Tonight I would like you to come to my camp.” And so she leaves with him. Mere human beings weren’t good enough for this young lady, and so now she has something really special.
MOYERS: If she hadn’t said no to the first suitors who came through the routine social convention—
CAMPBELL: —she wouldn’t be having this adventure. Now the adventure is strange and marvelous. She accompanies the man to his village, and they enter his lodge. They spend two nights and days together, and on the third day he says to her, “I’m going off today to hunt.” So he leaves. But after he has closed the flap of the entrance, she hears a strange sound outside. She spends the day in the hut alone and, when evening comes, she hears the strange sound again. The entrance flap is flung open, and in slides a prodigious serpent with tongue darting. He puts his head on her lap and says to her, “Now search my head for lice.” She finds all sorts of horrible things there, and when she has killed them all, he withdraws his head, slides out of the lodge, and in a moment, after the door flap has closed, it opens again, and in comes her same beautiful young man. “Were you afraid of me when I came in that way just now?” he asks.
“No,” she replies, “I wasn’t afraid at all.”
So the next day he goes off to hunt again, and presently she steps out of the lodge to gather firewood. The first thing she sees is an enormous serpent basking on the rocks—and then another, and another. She begins to feel very strange, homesick and discouraged, and returns to the lodge.
That evening, the serpent again comes sliding in, again departs and returns as a man. The third day when he has gone, the young woman decides she’s going to try to get out of this place. She leaves the lodge and is in the woods alone, standing, thinking, when she hears a voice. She turns, and there’s a little old man, who says, “Darling, you are in trouble. The man you’ve married is one of seven brothers. They are all great magicians and, like many people of this kind, their hearts are not in their bodies. Go back into the lodge, and in a bag that is hidden under the bed of the one to whom you are married, you will find a collection of seven hearts.” This is a standard worldwide shamanic motif. The heart is not in the body, so the magician