The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [99]
There have been systems of religion where the mother is the prime parent, the source. The mother is really a more immediate parent than the father because one is born from the mother, and the first experience of any infant is the mother. I have frequently thought that mythology is a sublimation of the mother image. We talk of Mother Earth. And in Egypt you have the Mother Heavens, the Goddess Nut, who is represented as the whole heavenly sphere.
MOYERS: I was seized in Egypt upon first seeing the figure of Nut in the ceiling of one of those temples.
CAMPBELL: Yes, I know the temple.
MOYERS: It’s overwhelming in both its ability to evoke awe and in its sensual character.
CAMPBELL: Yes. The idea of the Goddess is related to the fact that you’re born from your mother, and your father may be unknown to you, or the father may have died. Frequently, in the epics, when the hero is born, his father has died, or his father is in some other place, and then the hero has to go in quest of his father.
In the story of the incarnation of Jesus, the father of Jesus was the father in heaven, at least in terms of the symbology. When Jesus goes to the cross, he is on the way to the father, leaving the mother behind. And the cross, which is symbolic of the earth, is the mother symbol. So on the cross, Jesus leaves his body on the mother, from whom he has acquired his body, and he goes to the father, who is the ultimate transcendent mystery source.
MOYERS: What impact has this father quest had on us down through the centuries?
CAMPBELL: It’s a major theme in myth. There’s a little motif that occurs in many narratives related to a hero’s life, where the boy says, “Mother, who is my father?” She will say, “Well, your father is in such and such a place,” and then he goes on the father quest.
In the Odyssey, Odysseus’ son Telemachus is a tiny babe when Odysseus goes off to the Trojan War. The war lasts for ten years, and then, on his journey home, Odysseus is lost for ten more years in the mysterious world of the mythological Mediterranean. Athena comes to Telemachus, who is now twenty years old, and says, “Go find your father.” He doesn’t know where his father is. He goes to Nestor and asks, “Where do you think my father would be?” And Nestor says, “Well, go ask Proteus.” He’s on the father quest.
MOYERS: In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker says to his companions, “I wish I had known my father.” There’s something powerful in the image of the father quest. But why no mother quest?
CAMPBELL: Well, the mother’s right there. You’re born from your mother, and she’s the one who nurses you and instructs you and brings you up to the age when you must find your father.
Now, the finding of the father has to do with finding your own character and destiny. There’s a notion that the character is inherited from the father, and the body and very often the mind from the mother. But it’s your character that is the mystery, and your character is your destiny. So it is the discovery of your destiny that is symbolized by the father quest.
MOYERS: So when you find your father, you find yourself?
CAMPBELL: We have the word in English, “at-one-ment” with the father. You remember the story of Jesus lost in Jerusalem when he’s a little boy about twelve years old. His parents hunt for him, and when they find him in the temple, in conversation with the doctors of the law, they ask, “Why did you abandon us this way? Why did you give us this fear and anxiety?” And he says, “Didn’t you know I had to be about my father’s business?” He’s twelve years old—that’s the age of the adolescent initiations, finding who you are.
MOYERS: But what happened along the way to this reverence that in primitive societies was directed toward the Goddess figure, the Great Goddess, the mother earth—what happened to that?
CAMPBELL: Well, that was associated primarily with agriculture and the agricultural