VIII
MASKS
OF ETERNITY
The images of myth are reflections of the spiritual potentialities of every one
of us. Through contemplating these, we evoke their powers in our own lives.
MOYERS: As you've moved among various world views, dipping in and out of
cultures, civilizations, and religions, have you found something in common in
every culture that creates the need for God?
CAMPBELL: Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a
dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses.
There is a pertinent saying in one of the Upanishads: "When before the
beauty of a sunset or of a mountain you pause and exclaim, 'Ah,' you are participating
in divinity." Such a moment of participation involves a realization of the
wonder and sheer beauty of existence. People living in the world of nature
experience such moments every day. They live in the recognition of something
there that is much greater than the human dimension. Man's tendency, however,
is to personify such experiences, to anthropomorphize natural forces.
Our way of thinking in the West sees God as the final source or cause of the
energies and wonder of the universe. But in most Oriental thinking, and in
primal thinking, also, the gods are rather manifestations and purveyors of an
energy that is finally impersonal. They are not its source. The god is the
vehicle of its energy. And the force or quality of the energy that is involved
or represented determines the character and function of the god. There are gods
of violence, there are gods of compassion, there are gods that unite the two
worlds of the unseen and the seen, and there are gods that are simply the
protectors of kings or nations in their war campaigns. These are all
personifications of the energies in play. But the ultimate source of the
energies remains a mystery.
MOYERS: Doesn't this make fate a kind of anarchy, a continuing war among
principalities?
CAMPBELL: Yes, as it is in life itself. Even in our minds -- when it comes to
making a decision, there will be a war. In acting in relationship to other
people, for example, there may be four or five possibilities. The influence of
the dominant divinity in my mind will be what determines my decision. If my
guiding divinity is brutal, my decision will be brutal, as well.
MOYERS: What does that do to faith? You are a man of faith, of wonder, and --
CAMPBELL: No, I don't have to have faith, I have experience.
MOYERS: What kind of experience?
CAMPBELL: I have experience of the wonder of life. I have experience of love. I
have experience of hatred, malice, and wanting to punch this guy in the jaw.
From the point of view of symbolic imaging, those are different forces
operating in my mind. One may think of them -- wonder, love, hatred -- as
inspired by different divinities.
When I was a little boy being brought up as a Roman Catholic, I was told I had
a guardian angel on my right side and a tempting devil on my left, and that the
decisions I made in life would depend on whether the devil or the angel had the
greater influence upon me. As a boy, I concretized these thoughts, and I think
my teachers did, too. We thought there was really an angel there, and that the
angel was a fact, and that the devil was also a fact. But instead of regarding
them as facts, I can now think of them as metaphors for the impulses that move
and guide me.
MOYERS: Where do these energies come from?
CAMPBELL: From your own life, from the energies of your own body. The different
organs in the body, including your head, are in conflict with each
other.
MOYERS: And your life comes from where?
CAMPBELL: From the ultimate energy that is the life of the universe. And then
do you say, "Well, there must be somebody generating that energy"? Why
do you have to say that? Why can't the ultimate mystery be impersonal?
MOYERS: Can men and women live with an impersonality?
CAMPBELL: Yes, they do all over the place. Just go east of Suez. You know there
is this tendency in the West to anthropomorphize and accent the humanity of the
gods, the personifications: Yahweh, for example, as either a god of wrath, of
justice and punishment, or as a favoring god who is the support of your life,
as we read, for example, in the Psalms. But in the East, the gods are much more
elemental, much less human and much more like the powers of nature.
MOYERS: When someone says, "Imagine God," the child in our culture
will say, "An old man in a long white robe with a beard."
CAMPBELL: In our culture, yes. It's our fashion to think of God in masculine
form, but many traditions think of divine power principally in female form.
MOYERS: The idea is that you cannot imagine what you cannot personify. Do you
think it's possible to center the mind on what Plato called "thoughts
immortal and divine"?
CAMPBELL: Of course. That's what a meditation is. Meditation means constantly thinking
on a certain theme. It can be on any level. I don't make a big split in my
thinking between the physical and the spiritual. For example, meditation on
money is a perfectly good meditation. And bringing up a family is a very
important meditation. But there is an alone meditation, when you go into the
cathedral, for example.
MOYERS: So prayer is actually a meditation.
CAMPBELL: Prayer is relating to and meditating on a mystery.
MOYERS: Calling a power from within.
CAMPBELL: There is a form of meditation you are taught in Roman Catholicism
where you recite the rosary, the same prayer, over and over and over again.
That pulls the mind in. In Sanskrit, this practice is called japa,
"repetition of the holy name." It blocks other interests out and
allows you to concentrate on one thing, and then, depending on your own powers
of imagination, to experience the profundity of this mystery.
MOYERS: How does one have a profound experience?
CAMPBELL: By having a profound sense of the mystery.
MOYERS: But if God is the god we have only imagined, how can we stand in awe of
our own creation?
CAMPBELL: How can we be terrified by a dream? You have to break past your image
of God to get through to the connoted illumination. The psychologist Jung has a
relevant saying: "Religion is a defense against the experience of
God."
The mystery has been reduced to a set of concepts and ideas, and emphasizing
these concepts and ideas can short-circuit the transcendent, connoted
experience. An intense experience of mystery is what one has to regard as the
ultimate religious experience.
MOYERS: There are many Christians who believe that, to find out who Jesus is,
you have to go past the Christian faith, past the Christian doctrine, past the
Christian Church --
CAMPBELL: You have to go past the imagined image of Jesus. Such an image of
one's god becomes a final obstruction, one's ultimate barrier. You hold on to
your own ideology, your own little manner of thinking, and when a larger
experience of God approaches, an experience greater than you are prepared to
receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image in your mind. This is
known as preserving your faith.
You know the idea of the ascent of the spirit through the different centers or
archetypal stages of experience. One begins with the elementary animal
experiences of hunger and greed, and then of sexual zeal, and on to physical
mastery of one kind or another. These are all empowering stages of experience.
But then, when the center of the heart is touched, and a sense of compassion
awakened with another person or creature, and you realize that you and that
other are in some sense creatures of the one life in being, a whole new stage
of life in the spirit opens out. This opening of the heart to the world is what
is symbolized mythologically as the virgin birth. It signifies the birth of a
spiritual life in what was formerly an elementary human animal living for the
merely physical aims of health, progeny, power, and a little fun.
But now we come to something else. For to experience this sense of compassion,
accord, or even identity with another, or with some ego-transcending principle
that has become lodged in your mind as a good to be revered and served, is the
beginning, once and for all, of the properly religious way of life and experience;
and this may then lead to a life-consuming quest for a full experience of that
one Being of beings of which all temporal forms are the reflections.
Now, this ultimate ground of all being can be experienced in two senses, one as
with form and the other as without and beyond form. When you experience your
god as with form, there is your envisioning mind, and there is the god. There
is a subject, and there is an object. But the ultimate mystical goal is to be
united with one's god. With that, duality is transcended and forms disappear.
There is nobody there, no god, no you. Your mind, going past all concepts, has
dissolved in identification with the ground of your own being, because that to
which the metaphorical image of your god refers is the ultimate mystery of your
own being, which is the mystery of the being of the world as well. And so this
is it.
MOYERS: Of course the heart of the Christian faith is that God was in Christ, that
these elemental forces you're talking about embodied themselves in a human
being who reconciled mankind to God.
CAMPBELL: Yes, and the basic Gnostic and Buddhist idea is that that is true of
you and me as well. Jesus was a historical person who realized in himself that
he and what he called the Father were one, and he lived out of that knowledge
of the Christhood of his nature.
I remember, I was once giving a lecture in which I spoke about living out of
the sense of the Christ in you, and a priest in the audience (as I was later
told) turned to the woman beside him and whispered, "That's
blasphemy."
MOYERS: What did you mean by Christ in you?
CAMPBELL: What I meant was that you must live not in terms of your own ego
system, your own desires, but in terms of what you might call the sense of
mankind -- the Christ -- in you. There is a Hindu saying, "None but a god
can worship a god." You have to identify yourself in some measure with whatever
spiritual principle your god represents to you in order to worship him properly
and live according to his word.
MOYERS: In discussing the god within, the Christ within, the illumination or
the awakening that comes within, isn't there a danger of becoming narcissistic,
of an obsession with self that leads to a distorted view of oneself and the
world?
CAMPBELL: That can happen, of course. That's a kind of short-circuiting of the
current. But the whole aim is to go past oneself, past one's concept of
oneself, to that of which one is but an imperfect manifestation. When you come
out of a meditation, for example, you are supposed to end by yielding all the
benefits, whatever they may be, to the world, to all living beings, not holding
them to yourself.
You see, there are two ways of thinking "I am God." If you think,
"I here, in my physical presence and in my temporal character, am
God," then you are mad and have short-circuited the experience. You are God,
not in your ego, but in your deepest being, where you are at one with the
nondual transcendent.
MOYERS: Somewhere you say that we can become savior figures to those in our
circle -- our children, our wives, our loved ones, our neighbors -- but never
the Savior. You say we can be mother and father but never the Mother and the
Father. That's a recognition of limitation, isn't it?
CAMPBELL: Yes, it is.
MOYERS: What do you think about the Savior Jesus?
CAMPBELL: We just don't know very much about Jesus. All we know are four
contradictory texts that purport to tell us what he said and did.
MOYERS: Written many years after he lived.
CAMPBELL: Yes, but in spite of this, I think we may know approximately what
Jesus said. I think the sayings of Jesus are probably pretty close to the
originals. The main teaching of Christ, for example, is, Love your enemies.
MOYERS: How do you love your enemy without condoning what the enemy does,
without accepting his aggression?
CAMPBELL: I'll tell you how to do that: do not pluck the mote from your enemy's
eyes, but pluck the beam from your own. No one is in a position to disqualify
his enemy's way of life.
MOYERS: Do you think Jesus today would be a Christian?
CAMPBELL: Not the kind of Christian we know. Perhaps some of the monks and nuns
who are really in touch with high spiritual mysteries would be of the sort that
Jesus was.
MOYERS: So Jesus might not have belonged to the Church militant?
CAMPBELL: There's nothing militant about Jesus. I don't read anything like that
in any of the gospels. Peter drew his sword and cut off the servant's ear, and
Jesus said, "Put back thy sword, Peter." But Peter has had his sword
out and at work ever since.
I've lived through the twentieth century, and I know what I was told as a boy
about a people who weren't yet and never had been our enemies. In order to
represent them as potential enemies, and to justify our attack upon them, a
campaign of hatred, misrepresentation, and denigration was launched, of which
the echoes ring to this day.
MOYERS: And yet we're told God is love. You once took the saying of Jesus,
"Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may
be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes the sun to rise on the
evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust" -- you once
took this to be the highest, the noblest, the boldest of the Christian
teachings. Do you still feel that way?
CAMPBELL: I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and,
unless that is there, you have nothing.
MOYERS: I'll tell you what the most gripping scripture in the Christian New
Testament is for me: "I believe. Help thou my unbelief." I believe in
this ultimate reality, that I can and do experience it. But I don't have
answers to my questions. I believe in the question, Is there a God?
CAMPBELL: A couple of years ago, I had a very amusing experience. I was in the
New York Athletic Club swimming pool, where I was introduced to a priest who
was a professor at one of our Catholic universities. So after I had had my
swim, I came and sat in a lounging chair in what we call the "horizontal
athlete" position, and the priest, who was beside me, asked, "Now,
Mr. Campbell, are you a priest?"
I answered, "No, Father."
He asked, "Are you a Catholic?"
I answered, "I was, Father."
Then he asked -- and I think it interesting that he phrased the question in
this way -- "Do you believe in a personal god?"
"No, Father," I said.
And he replied, "Well, I suppose there is no way to prove by logic the
existence of a personal god."
"If there were, Father," said I, "what then would be the value
of faith?"
"Well, Mr. Campbell," said the priest quickly, "it's nice to
have met you." And he was off. I felt I had executed a jujitsu throw.
But that was an illuminating conversation to me. The fact that a Catholic
father had asked, "Do you believe in a personal god?" meant to me
that he also recognized the possibility of an impersonal god, namely, a
transcendent ground or energy in itself. The idea of Buddha consciousness is of
an immanent, luminous consciousness that informs all things and all lives. We
unthinkingly live by fragments of that consciousness, fragments of that energy.
But the religious way of life is to live not in terms of the self-interested
intentions of this particular body at this particular time but in terms of the
insight of that larger consciousness.
There is an important passage in the recently discovered Gnostic Gospel
According to St. Thomas: " 'When will the kingdom come?' Christ's
disciples ask." In Mark 13, I think it is, we read that the end of the
world is about to come. That is to say, a mythological image -- that of the end
of the world -- is there taken as predicting an actual, physical, historical
fact to be. But in Thomas' version, Jesus replies: "The kingdom of the
Father will not come by expectation. The kingdom of the Father is spread upon
the earth and men do not see it" -- so I look at you now in that sense,
and the radiance of the presence of the divine is known to me through you.
MOYERS: Through me?
CAMPBELL: You, sure. When Jesus says, "He who drinks from my mouth will
become as I am and I shall be he," he's talking from the point of view of
that being of beings, which we call the Christ, who is the being of all of us.
Anyone who lives in relation to that is as Christ. Anyone who brings into his
life the message of the Word is equivalent to Jesus, that's the sense of that.
MOYERS: So that's what you mean when you say, "I am radiating God to
you."
CAMPBELL: You are, yes.
MOYERS: And you to me?
CAMPBELL: And I am speaking this seriously.
MOYERS: I take it seriously. I do sense that there is divinity in the other.
CAMPBELL: Not only that, but what you represent in this conversation and what
you're trying to bring out is a realization of these spiritual principles. So
you are the vehicle. You are radiant of the spirit.
MOYERS: Is this true for everyone?
CAMPBELL: It is true for everyone who has reached in his life the level of the
heart.
MOYERS: You really believe there is a geography of the psyche?
CAMPBELL: This is metaphorical language, but you can say that some people are living
on the level of the sex organs, and that's all they're living for. That's the
meaning of life. This is Freud's philosophy, is it not? Then you come to the
Adlerian philosophy of the will to power, that all of life is centered on
obstructions and overcoming the obstructions. Well, sure, that's a perfectly
good life, and those are forms of divinity also. But they are on the animal
level. Then there comes another kind of life, which involves giving oneself to
others one way or another. This is the one that's symbolized in the opening of
the heart.
MOYERS: What is the source of that life?
CAMPBELL: It must be a recognition of your life in the other, of the one life
in the two of us. God is an image for that one life. We ask ourselves where
this one life comes from, and people who think everything has to have been made
by somebody will think, "Well, God made it." So God's the source of
all this.
MOYERS: Well then, what is
religion?
'
CAMPBELL: The word "religion" means religio, linking back. If we say
it is the one life in both of us, then my separate life has been linked to the
one life, religio, linked back. This has become symbolized in the images of
religion, which represent that connecting link.
MOYERS: Jung, the famous psychologist, says that one of the most powerful
religious symbols is the circle. He says that the circle is one of the great
primordial images of mankind and that, in considering the symbol of the circle,
we are analyzing the self. What do you make of that?
CAMPBELL: The whole world is a circle. All of these circular images reflect the
psyche, so there may be some relationship between these architectural designs
and the actual structuring of our spiritual functions.
When a magician wants to work magic, he puts a circle around himself, and it is
within this bounded circle, this hermetically sealed-off area, that powers can
be brought into play that are lost outside the circle.
MOYERS: I remember reading about an Indian chief who said, "When we pitch
camp, we pitch a camp in a circle. When the eagle builds a nest, the nest is in
a circle. When we look at the horizon, the horizon is in a circle."
Circles were very important to some Indians, weren't they?
CAMPBELL: Yes. But they're also in much that we've inherited from Sumerian
mythology. We've inherited the circle with the four cardinal points and three
hundred and sixty degrees. The official Sumerian year was three hundred and
sixty days with five holy days that don't count, which are outside of time and
in which they had ceremonies relating their society to the heavens. Now we're
losing this sense of the circle in relation to time, because we have digital
time, where you just have time buzzing by. Out of the digital you get the sense
of the flow of time. At Penn Station in New York, there's a clock with the
hours, the minutes, the seconds, the tenths of seconds, and the hundredths of
seconds. When you see the hundredths of a second buzzing by, you realize how
time is running through you.
The circle, on the other hand, represents totality. Everything within the
circle is one thing, which is encircled, enframed. That would be the spatial
aspect. But the temporal aspect of the circle is that you leave, go somewhere,
and always come back. God is the alpha and the omega, the source and the end.
The circle suggests immediately a completed totality, whether in time or in
space.
MOYERS: No beginning, no end.
CAMPBELL: Round and round and round. Take the year, for example. When November
rolls around, we have Thanksgiving again. Then December comes, and we have
Christmas again. Not only does the month roll around again, but also the moon
cycle, the day cycle. We're reminded of this when we look at our watches and
see the cycle of time. It's the same hour, but another day.
MOYERS: China used to call itself the Kingdom of the Center, and the Aztecs had
a similar saying about their own culture. I suppose every culture using the
circle as the cosmological order puts itself at the center. Why do you suppose
the circle became so universally symbolic?
CAMPBELL: Because it's experienced all the time -- in the day, in the year, in
leaving home to go on your adventure -- hunting or whatever it may be -- and
coming back home. Then there is a deeper experience, too, the mystery of the
womb and the tomb. When people are buried, it's for rebirth. That's the origin
of the burial idea. You put someone back into the womb of mother earth for
rebirth. Very early images of the Goddess show her as a mother receiving the
soul back again.
MOYERS: When I read your works -- The Masks of God, or The Way of the Animal
Powers, or The Mythic Image -- I often come across images of the circle,
whether it's in magical designs or in architecture, both ancient and modern;
whether it's in the dome-shaped temples of India or the Paleolithic rock
engravings of Rhodesia or the calendar stones of the Aztecs or the ancient
Chinese bronze shields or the visions of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, who
talks about the wheel in the sky. I keep coming across this image. And this
ring, my wedding ring, is a circle, too. What does that symbolize?
CAMPBELL: That depends on how you understand marriage. The word
"sym-bol" itself means two things put together. One person has one half,
the other the other half, and then they come together. Recognition comes from
putting the ring together, the completed circle. This is my marriage, this is
the merging of my individual life in a larger life that is of two, where the
two are one. The ring indicates that we are in one circle together.
MOYERS: When a new pope is installed, he takes the fisherman's ring -- another
circle.
CAMPBELL: That particular ring
is symbolic of Jesus calling the apostles, who were fishermen. He said, "I
will make you fishers of men." This is an old motif that is earlier than
Christianity. Orpheus is called "The Fisher," who fishes men, who are
living as fish in the water, out up into the light. It's an old idea of the
metamorphosis of the fish into man. The fish nature is the crudest animal
nature of our character, and the religious line is intended to pull you up out
of that.
MOYERS: A new king or new queen of England is given the coronation ring.
CAMPBELL: Yes, because there's another aspect of the ring -- it is a bondage.
As king, you are bound to a principle. You are living not simply your own way.
You have been marked. In initiation rites, when people are sacrified and
tattooed, they are bonded to another and to the society.
MOYERS: Jung speaks of the circle as a mandala.
CAMPBELL: "Mandala" is the Sanskrit word for "circle," but
a circle that is coordinated or symbolically designed so that it has the
meaning of a cosmic order. When composing mandalas, you are trying to
coordinate your personal circle with the universal circle. In a very elaborate
Buddhist mandala, for example, you have the deity in the center as the power
source, the illumination source. The peripheral images would be manifestations
or aspects of the deity's radiance.
In working out a mandala for yourself, you draw a circle and then think of the
different impulse systems and value systems in your life. Then you compose them
and try to find out where your center is. Making a mandala is a discipline for
pulling all those scattered aspects of your life together, for finding a center
and ordering yourself to it. You try to coordinate your circle with the
universal circle.
MOYERS: To be at the center?
CAMPBELL: At the center, yes. For instance, among the Navaho Indians, healing
ceremonies are conducted through sand paintings, which are mostly mandalas on
the ground. The person who is to be treated moves into the mandala as a way of
moving into a mythological context that he will be identifying with -- he
identifies himself with the symbolized power. This idea of sand painting with
mandalas, and their use for meditation purposes, appears also in Tibet. Tibetan
monks practice sand painting, drawing cosmic images to represent the forces of
the spiritual powers that operate in our lives.
MOYERS: There is some effort, apparently, to try to center one's life with the
center of the universe --
CAMPBELL: -- by way of mythological imagery, yes. The image helps you to
identify with the symbolized force. You can't very well expect a person to
identify with an undifferentiated something or other. But when you give it
qualities that point toward certain realizations, the person can follow.
MOYERS: There is one theory that the Holy Grail represented the center of
perfect harmony, the search for perfection, for totality and unity.
CAMPBELL: There are a number of sources for the Holy Grail. One is that there
is a cauldron of plenty in the mansion of the god of the sea, down in the
depths of the unconscious. It is out of the depths of the unconscious that the
energies of life come to us. This cauldron is the inexhaustible source, the
center, the bubbling spring from which all life proceeds.
MOYERS: Do you think that is the unconscious?
CAMPBELL: Not only the unconscious but also the vale of the world. Things are
coming to life around you all the time. There is a life pouring into the world,
and it pours from an inexhaustible source.
MOYERS: Now, what do you make of that -- that in very different cultures,
separated by time and space, the same imagery emerges?
CAMPBELL: This speaks for certain powers in the psyche that are common to all
mankind. Otherwise you couldn't have such detailed correspondences.
MOYERS: So if you find that many different cultures tell the story of creation,
or the story of a virgin birth, or the story of a savior who comes and dies and
is resurrected, they are saying something about what is inside us, and our need
to understand.
CAMPBELL: That's right. The images of myth are reflections of the spiritual
potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating these we evoke their
powers in our own lives.
MOYERS: So when a scripture talks about man being made in God's image, it's
talking about certain qualities that every human being possesses, no matter
what that person's religion or culture or geography or heritage?
CAMPBELL: God would be the ultimate elementary idea of man.
MOYERS: The primal need.
CAMPBELL: And we are all made in the image of God. That is the ultimate
archetype of man.
MOYERS: Eliot speaks about the still point of the turning world, where motion
and stasis are together, the hub where the movement of time and the stillness
of eternity are together.
CAMPBELL: That's the inexhaustible center that is represented by the Grail.
When life comes into being, it is neither afraid nor desiring, it is just
becoming. Then it gets into being, and it begins to be afraid and desiring.
When you can get rid of fear and desire and just get back to where you're
becoming, you've hit the spot. Goethe says godhead is effective in the living
and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in what has already
become and set fast. So reason is concerned, he states, with striving toward
the divine through the becoming and the changing, while intelligence makes use
of the set fast, what is knowable, known, and so to be used for the shaping of
a life.
But the goal of your quest for knowledge of yourself is to be found at that
burning point in yourself, that becoming thing in yourself, which is innocent
of the goods and evils of the world as already become, and therefore desireless
and fearless. That is the condition of a warrior going into battle with perfect
courage. That is life in movement. That is the essence of the mysticism of war
as well as of a plant growing. I think of grass -- you know, every two weeks a
chap comes out with a lawnmower and cuts it down. Suppose the grass were to say,
"Well, for Pete's sake, what's the use if you keep getting cut down this
way?" Instead, it keeps on growing. That's the sense of the energy of the
center. That's the meaning of the image of the Grail, of the inexhaustible
fountain, of the source. The source doesn't care what happens once it gives
into being. It's the giving and coming into being that counts, and that's the
becoming life point in you. That's what all these myths are concerned to tell
you.
In the study of comparative mythology, we compare the images in one system with
the images in another, and both become illuminated because one will accent and
give clear expression to one aspect of the meaning, and another to another.
They clarify each other.
When I started teaching comparative mythology, I was afraid I might destroy my
students' religious beliefs, but what I found was just the opposite. Religious
traditions, which didn't mean very much to them, but which were the ones their
parents had given them, suddenly became illuminated in a new way when we
compared them with other traditions, where similar images had been given a more
inward or spiritual interpretation.
I had Christian students, Jewish students, Buddhist students, a couple of
Zoroastrian students -- they all had this experience. There's no danger in
interpreting the symbols of a religious system and calling them metaphors
instead of facts. What that does is to turn them into messages for your own
inward experience and life. The system suddenly becomes a personal experience.
MOYERS: I feel stronger in my own faith knowing that others experienced the
same yearnings and were seeking for similar images to try to express an
experience beyond the costume of ordinary human language.
CAMPBELL: This is why clowns and clown religions are helpful. Germanic and
Celtic myths are full of clown figures, really grotesque deities. This makes
the point, I am not the ultimate image, I am transparent to something. Look
through me, through my funny form.
MOYERS: There's a wonderful story in some African tradition of the god who's
walking down the road wearing a hat that is colored red on one side and blue on
the other side. When the farmers in the field go into the village in the
evening, they say, "Did you see that god with the blue hat?" And the
others say, "No, no, he had a red hat on." And they get into a fight.
CAMPBELL: Yes, that's the Nigerian trickster god, Eshu. He makes it even worse by
first walking in one direction and then turning around and turning his hat
around, too, so that again it will be red or blue. Then when these two chaps
get into a fight and are brought before the king for judgment, this trickster
god appears, and he says, "It's my fault, I did it, and I meant to do it.
Spreading strife is my greatest joy."
MOYERS: There's a truth in that.
CAMPBELL: There sure is. Heraclitus said strife is the creator of all great
things. Something like that may be implicit in this symbolic trickster idea. In
our tradition, the serpent in the Garden did the job. Just when everything was
fixed and fine, he threw an apple into the picture.
No matter what the system of thought you may have, it can't possibly include
boundless life. When you think everything is just that way, the trickster
arrives, and it all blows, and you get change and becoming again.
MOYERS: I notice when you tell these stories, Joe, you tell them with humor.
You always seem to enjoy them, even when they're about odd and cruel things.
CAMPBELL: A key difference between mythology and our Judeo-Christian religion
is that the imagery of mythology is rendered with humor. You realize that the
image is symbolic of something. You're at a distance from it. But in our
religion, everything is prosaic, and very, very serious. You can't fool around
with Yahweh.
MOYERS: How do you explain what the psychologist Maslow called "peak
experiences" and what James Joyce called "epiphanies"?
CAMPBELL: Well, they are not quite the same. The peak experience refers to
actual moments of your life when you experience your relationship to the harmony
of being. My own peak experiences, the ones that I knew were peak experiences
after I had them, all came in athletics.
MOYERS: Which was the Everest of your experience?
CAMPBELL: When I was running at Columbia, I ran a couple of races that were
just beautiful. During the second race, I knew I was going to win even though
there was no reason for me to know this, because I was touched off as anchor in
the relay with the leading runner thirty yards ahead of me. But I just knew,
and it was my peak experience. Nobody could beat me that day. That's being in
full form and really knowing it. I don't think I have ever done anything in my
life as competently as I ran those two races -- it was the experience of really
being at my full and doing a perfect job.
MOYERS: Not all peak experiences are physical.
CAMPBELL: No, there are other kinds of peak experiences. But those were the
ones that come to my mind when I think about peak experiences.
MOYERS: What about James Joyce's epiphanies?
CAMPBELL: Now, that's something else. Joyce's formula for the aesthetic
experience is that it does not move you to want to possess the object. A work of
art that moves you to possess the object depicted, he calls pornography. Nor
does the aesthetic experience move you to criticize and reject the object --
such art he calls didactic, or social criticism in art. The aesthetic
experience is a simple beholding of the object. Joyce says that you put a frame
around it and see it first as one thing, and that, in seeing it as one thing,
you then become aware of the relationship of part to part, each part to the
whole, and the whole to each of its parts. This is the essential, aesthetic
factor -- rhythm, the harmonious rhythm of relationships. And when a fortunate
rhythm has been struck by the artist, you experience a radiance. You are held
in aesthetic arrest. That is the epiphany. And that is what might in religious
terms be thought of as the all-informing Christ principle coming through.
MOYERS: The face of the saint beholding God?
CAMPBELL: It doesn't matter who it is. You could take someone whom you might
think of as a monster. The aesthetic experience transcends ethics and
didactics.
MOYERS: That's where I would disagree with you. It seems to me that in order to
experience the epiphany, the object you behold but do not want to possess must
be beautiful in some way. And a moment ago, when you talked about your peak
experience, running, you said it was beautiful. "Beautiful" is an
aesthetic word. Beauty is the harmony.
CAMPBELL: Yes.
MOYERS: And yet you said it's also in Joyce's epiphanies, and that concerns art
and the aesthetic.
CAMPBELL: Yes.
MOYERS: It seems to me they are the same if they're both beautiful. How can you
behold a monster and have an epiphany?
CAMPBELL: There's another emotion associated with art, which is not of the
beautiful but of the sublime. What we call monsters can be experienced as
sublime. They represent powers too vast for the normal forms of life to contain
them. An immense expanse of space is sublime. The Buddhists know how to achieve
this effect in situating their temples, which are often up on high hills. For
example, some of the temple gardens in Japan are designed so that you will
first be experiencing close-in, intimate arrangements. Meanwhile, you're
climbing, until suddenly you break past a screen and an expanse of horizon
opens out, and somehow, with this diminishment of your own ego, your
consciousness expands to an experience of the sublime.
Another mode of the sublime is of prodigious energy, force, and power. I've
known a number of people who were in Central Europe during the Anglo-American
saturation bombings of their cities -- and several have described this inhuman
experience as not only terrible but in a measure sublime.
MOYERS: I once interviewed a veteran of the Second World War. I talked to him
about his experience at the Battle of the Bulge, in that bitter winter when the
surprise German assault was about to succeed. I said, "As you look back on
it, what was it?" And he said, "It was sublime."
CAMPBELL: And so the monster comes through as a kind of god.
MOYERS: And by the monster you mean --
CAMPBELL: By a monster I mean some horrendous presence or apparition that
explodes all of your standards for harmony, order, and ethical conduct. For
example, Vishnu at the end of the world appears as a monster. There he is,
destroying the universe, first with fire and then with a torrential flood that
drowns out the fire and everything else. Nothing is left but ash. The whole
universe with all its life and lives has been utterly wiped out. That's God in
the role of destroyer. Such experiences go past ethical or aesthetic judgments.
Ethics is wiped out. Whereas in our religions, with their accent on the human,
there is also an accent on the ethical -- God is qualified as good. No, no! God
is horrific. Any god who can invent hell is no candidate for the Salvation
Army. The end of the world, think of it! But there is a Muslim saying about the
Angel of Death: "When the Angel of Death approaches, he is terrible. When
he reaches you, it is bliss."
In Buddhist systems, more especially those of Tibet, the meditation Buddhas appear
in two aspects, one peaceful and the other wrathful. If you are clinging
fiercely to your ego and its little temporal world of sorrows and joys, hanging
on for dear life, it will be the wrathful aspect of the deity that appears. It
will seem terrifying. But the moment your ego yields and gives up, that same
meditation Buddha is experienced as a bestower of bliss.
MOYERS: Jesus did talk of bringing a sword, and I don't believe he meant to use
it against your fellow. He meant it in terms of opening the ego --I come to cut
you free from the binding ego of your own self.
CAMPBELL: This is what is known in Sanskrit as viveka,
"discrimination." There is a very important Buddha figure who is
shown holding a flaming sword high over his head -- and so what is that sword
for? It is the sword of discrimination, separating the merely temporal from the
eternal. It is the sword distinguishing that which is enduring from that which
is merely passing. The tick-tick-tick of time shuts out eternity. We live in
this field of time. But what is reflected in this field is an eternal principle
made manifest.
MOYERS: The experience of the eternal.
CAMPBELL: The experience of what you are.
MOYERS: Yes, but whatever eternity is, it is here right now.
CAMPBELL: And nowhere else. Or everywhere else. If you don't experience it here
and now, you're not going to get it in heaven. Heaven is not eternal, it's just
everlasting.
MOYERS: I don't follow that.
CAMPBELL: Heaven and hell are described as forever. Heaven is of unending time.
It is not eternal. Eternal is beyond time. The concept of time shuts out
eternity. It is over the ground of that deep experience of eternity that all of
these temporal pains and troubles come and go. There is a Buddhist ideal of
participating willingly and joyfully in the passing sorrows of the world.
Wherever there is time, there is sorrow. But this experience of sorrow moves
over a sense of enduring being, which is our own true life.
MOYERS: There's some image of Shiva, the god Shiva, surrounded by circles of
flame, rings of fire.
CAMPBELL: That's the radiance of the god's dance. Shiva's dance is the universe.
In his hair is a skull and a new moon, death and rebirth at the same moment,
the moment of becoming. In one hand he has a little drum that goes
tick-tick-tick. That is the drum of time, the tick of time which shuts out the
knowledge of eternity. We are enclosed in time. But in Shiva's opposite hand
there is a flame which burns away the veil of time and opens our minds to
eternity.
Shiva is a very ancient deity, perhaps the most ancient worshiped in the world
today. There are images from 2000 or 2500 B.C. , little stamp seals showing
figures that clearly suggest Shiva.
In some of his manifestations he is a really horrendous god, representing the
terrific aspects of the nature of being. He is the archetypal yogi, canceling the
illusion of life, but he is also the creator of life, its generator, as well as
illuminator.
MOYERS: Myths deal with metaphysics. But religion also deals with ethics, good
and evil, and how I am to relate to you, and how I should behave toward you and
toward my wife and toward my fellow man under God. What is the place and role
of ethics in mythology?
CAMPBELL: We spoke of the metaphysical experience in which you realize that you
and the other are one. Ethics is a way of teaching you how to live as though
you were one with the other. You don't have to have the experience because the
doctrine of the religion gives you molds of actions that imply a compassionate
relationship with the other. It offers an incentive for doing this by teaching
you that simply acting in your own self-interest is sin. That is identification
with your body.
MOYERS: Love they neighbor as thyself because thy neighbor is thyself.
CAMPBELL: That is what you have learned when you have done so.
MOYERS: Why do you think so many people have a deep yearning to live forever?
CAMPBELL: That's something I don't understand.
MOYERS: Does it come out of the fear of hell and the desirable alternative?
CAMPBELL: That's good standard Christian doctrine -- that at the end of the
world there will be a general judgment and those who have acted virtuously will
be sent to heaven, and those who have acted in an evil way, to hell.
This is a theme that goes back to Egypt. Osiris is the god who died and was
resurrected and in his eternal aspect will sit as judge of the dead. Mummification
was to prepare the person to face the god. But an interesting thing in Egypt is
that the person going to the god is to recognize his identity with the god. In
the Christian tradition, that's not allowed. So if you're saying that the
alternative is hell or heaven, well, give me heaven forever. But when you
realize that heaven is a beholding of the beatific image of God -- that would
be a timeless moment. Time explodes, so again, eternity is not something
everlasting. You can have it right here, now, in your experience of your
earthly relationships.
I've lost a lot of friends, as well as my parents. A realization has come to me
very, very keenly, however, that I haven't lost them. That moment when I was
with them has an everlasting quality about it that is now still with me. What
it gave me then is still with me, and there's a kind of intimation of
immortality in that.
There is a story of the Buddha, who encountered a woman who had just lost her
son, and she was in great grief. The Buddha said, "I suggest that you just
ask around to meet somebody who has not lost a treasured child or husband or
relative or friend." Understanding the relationship of mortality to
something in you that is transcendent of mortality is a difficult task.
MOYERS: Myths are full of the desire for immortality, are they not?
CAMPBELL: Yes. But when immortality is misunderstood as being an everlasting
body, it turns into a clown act, really. On the other hand, when immortality is
understood to be identification with that which is of eternity in your own life
now, it's something else again.
MOYERS: You've said that the whole question of life revolves around being
versus becoming.
CAMPBELL: Yes. Becoming is always fractional. And being is total.
MOYERS: What do you mean?
CAMPBELL: Well, let's say you are going to become fully human. In the first few
years you are a child, and that is only a fraction of the human being. In a few
more years you are in adolescence, and that is certainly a fraction of the
human being. In maturity you are still fractional -- you are not a child, but
you are not old yet. There is an image in the Upanishads of the original,
concentrated energy which was the big bang of creation that set forth the
world, consigning all things to the fragmentation of time. But to see through
the fragments of time to the full power of original being -- that is a function
of art.
MOYERS: Beauty is an expression of that rapture of being alive.
CAMPBELL: Every moment should be such an experience.
MOYERS: And what we are going to become tomorrow is not important as compared
to this experience.
CAMPBELL: This is the great moment, Bill. What we are trying to do in a certain
way is to get the being of our subject rendered through the partial way we have
of expressing it.
MOYERS: But if we can't describe God, if our language is not adequate, how is
it that we build these buildings that are sublime? How do we create these works
of art that reflect what artists think of God? How do we do this?
CAMPBELL: Well, that's what art reflects -- what artists think of God, what
people experience of God. But the ultimate, unqualified mystery is beyond human
experience.
MOYERS: So whatever it is we experience we have to express in language that is
just not up to the occasion.
CAMPBELL: That's it. That's what poetry is for. Poetry is a language that has
to be penetrated. Poetry involves a precise choice of words that will have
implications and suggestions that go past the words themselves. Then you
experience the radiance, the epiphany. The epiphany is the showing through of
the essence.
MOYERS: So the experience of God is beyond description, but we feel compelled
to try to describe it?
CAMPBELL: That's right. Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an
Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when
you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have
had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events
that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to
have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who
composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed
by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your
whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will
have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of
your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving
meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big
symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And
Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the
one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream,
too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life
which is the universal will in nature.
It's a magnificent idea -- an idea that appears in India in the mythic image of
the Net of Indra, which is a net of gems, where at every crossing of one thread
over another there is a gem reflecting all the other reflective gems.
Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else, so you can't blame
anybody for anything. It is even as though there were a single intention behind
it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the
sense might be, or has lived the life that he quite intended.
MOYERS: And yet we all have lived a life that had a purpose. Do you believe
that?
CAMPBELL: I don't believe life has a purpose. Life is a lot of protoplasm with
an urge to reproduce and continue in being.
MOYERS: Not true -- not true.
CAMPBELL: Wait a minute. Just sheer life cannot be said to have a purpose,
because look at all the different purposes it has all over the place. But each
incarnation, you might say, has a potentiality, and the mission of life is to
live that potentiality. How do you do it? My answer is, "Follow your
bliss." There's something inside you that knows when you're in the center,
that knows when you're on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam
to earn money, you've lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don't
get any money, you still have your bliss.
MOYERS: I like the idea that it is not the destination that counts, it's the
journey.
CAMPBELL: Yes. As Karlfried Graf DYANrckheim says, "When you're on a
journey, and the end keeps getting further and further away, then you realize
that the real end is the journey."
The Navaho have that wonderful image of what they call the pollen path. Pollen
is the life source. The pollen path is the path to the center. The Navaho say,
"Oh, beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty to the right of me, beauty
to the left of me, beauty above me, beauty below me, I'm on the pollen
path."
MOYERS: Eden was not. Eden will be.
CAMPBELL: Eden is. "The kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth,
and men do not see it."
MOYERS: Eden is -- in this world of pain and suffering and death and violence?
CAMPBELL: That is the way it feels, but this is it, this is Eden. When you see
the kingdom spread upon the earth, the old way of living in the world is
annihilated. That is the end of the world. The end of the world is not an event
to come, it is an event of psychological transformation, of visionary
transformation. You see not the world of solid things but a world of radiance.
MOYERS: I interpreted that powerful and mysterious statement, "The word
was made flesh," as this eternal principle finding itself in the human
journey, in our experience.
CAMPBELL: And you can find the word in yourself, too.
MOYERS: Where do you find it if you don't find it in yourself?
CAMPBELL: It's been said that poetry consists of letting the word be heard
beyond words. And Goethe says, "All things are metaphors." Everything
that's transitory is but a metaphorical reference. That's what we all are.
MOYERS: But how does one worship a metaphor, love a metaphor, die for a
metaphor?
CAMPBELL: That's what people are doing all over the place -- dying for
metaphors. But when you really realize the sound, "AUM," the sound of
the mystery of the word everywhere, then you don't have to go out and die for
anything because it's right there all around. Just sit still and see it and
experience it and know it. That's a peak experience.
MOYERS: Explain AUM.
CAMPBELL: "AUM" is a word that represents to our ears that sound of
the energy of the universe of which all things are manifestations. You start in
the back of the mouth "ahh," and then "oo," you fill the
mouth, and "mm" closes the mouth. When you pronounce this properly,
all vowel sounds are included in the pronunciation. AUM. Consonants are here
regarded simply as interruptions of the essential vowel sound. All words are
thus fragments of AUM, just as all images are fragments of the Form of forms.
AUM is a symbolic sound that puts you in touch with that resounding being that
is the universe. If you heard some of the recordings of Tibetan monks chanting
AUM, you would know what the word means, all right. That's the AUM of being in
the world. To be in touch with that and to get the sense of that is the peak
experience of all.
A-U-M. The birth, the coming into being, and the dissolution that cycles back.
AUM is called the "four-element syllable." A-U-M -- and what is the
fourth element? The silence out of which AUM arises, and back into which it
goes, and which underlies it. My life is the A-U-M, but there is a silence
underlying it, too. That is what we would call the immortal. This is the mortal
and that's the immortal, and there wouldn't be the mortal if there weren't the
immortal. One must discriminate between the mortal aspect and the immortal
aspect of one's own existence. In the experience of my mother and father who
are gone, of whom I was born, I have come to understand that there is more than
what was our temporal relationship. Of course there were certain moments in
that relationship when an emphatic demonstration of what the relationship was
would be brought to my realization. I clearly remember some of those. They
stand out as moments of epiphany, of revelation, of the radiance.
MOYERS: The meaning is essentially wordless.
CAMPBELL: Yes. Words are always qualifications and limitations.
MOYERS: And yet, Joe, all we puny human beings are left with is this miserable
language, beautiful though it is, that falls short of trying to describe --
CAMPBELL: That's right, and that's why it is a peak experience to break past
all that, every now and then, and to realize, "Oh. . . ah. . ."
Joseph campbell (1904-87) began his career in 1934 as an instructor at Sarah
Lawrence College, where he taught for almost forty years, and where the Joseph
Campbell Chair in Comparative Mythology was established in his honor. He is the
author of numerous books, including the bestselling The Hero with a Thousand
Faces.
Bill Moyers is an acclaimed journalist, widely respected for his work both at
CBS News and at PBS. One of his primary efforts has been to bring to television
outstanding thinkers of our time, most recently in the immensely popular and
highly celebrated PBS series and bestselling book A World of Ideas. His
conversations with Joseph Campbell were one of the highlights of television
programming in the 1980s.