Introduction
Campbell
“So through the eyes love attains the heart, for the eyes are the scouts of the heart. And the eyes go reconnoitering for what it would please the heart to possess. And when they are in full accord and firm, all three in one resolve, at that time perfect love is born from what the eyes have made welcome, to the heart. For as all true loves know, love is perfect kindness, which is born, there is no doubt, from the heart and the eyes.”
Moyers
If there were a giant map of the world’s great mythologies, you could throw a dart, and anywhere it lands you find a love story: tales woven to express the heart’s deepest desire. For example, the ancient Babylonian myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, two young lovers doomed by a chance mistake and bad timing. Or Echo and Narcissus, a trail of seductions that ends with a dagger through a broken heart. Tristan and Isolde. Take your pick. There are multitudes of choices.
The study of the mythology of love was a favorite of Joseph Campbell’s. One of his best and most famous essays celebrates this universal mystery. Ask him where he would like to start, as I did during our conversations on the power of myth a quarter of a century ago, and he invariably answered: “In the Middle Ages.” He relished its stories of love and courtship for the noble and gentle hearts that managed somehow to transcend raw lust. Because those stories helped to create a distinctive Western consciousness, in time they would encourage personal challenges to the dogma of church and state. So love, in other words, as Joe said, could lead to revolution—even against God.
Our first conversations took place at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch in California. Like a weaver of fine cloth, Campbell spun the tales and legends of love to a marvelous tapestry of the human psyche.
Part 1
Moyers
Let’s talk about love.
Campbell
Let’s talk about love, fine.
Moyers
But it’s such a vast subject, that if, in mythology, that if I had come to you and said, “Let’s talk about love, but where should we begin?”—what would your answer have been?
Campbell
I think my answer would have been the troubadours in the twelfth century. Let’s begin there.
Moyers
Why the troubadours?
Campbell
Well, because they’re the first ones in the West that really considered love in the sense that we think of it now, as a person-to-person relationship.
Moyers
You’re talking about romantic love?
Campbell
Yes. It is the seizure that comes in recognizing as where your soul’s counterpart in the other person. And that’s what the troubadours stood for, and that has become the ideal in our lives today.
Moyers
What had it been before that?
Campbell
Well, the idea of love as Eros—the god who excites you to sexual desire—this is not the person-to-person thing, of the falling in love in the way the troubadours understood it. I have a definition for Eros, the erotic biological urge, as the zeal of the organs for each other, and the personal factor doesn’t matter.
Moyers
Where did Eros come from?
Campbell
Well, Eros is Cupid. And in India the god of love is Kama—and he’s no Cupid, he’s a big, vigorous youth with a bow and a quiver of arrows, and the names of the arrows are such things as “Death-Bringing Agony,” and “Open Up,” and, really, he just drives this thing into you, so that it’s a total physiological, psychological explosion that takes place. Then, the other love, the Christian love of Agape—spiritual love, “love thy neighbor as thyself”—again, it doesn’t matter who the person is, I mean, it’s your neighbor, you must have that kind of love. But the kind of seizure that comes from the meeting of the eyes, as they say in the troubadour tradition, and the purely personal, person-to-person thing, as far as I know it originates as an ideal to be lived for, with the troubadours.
Moyers
You’ve said that what happened in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries “was one of the most important mutations of human feeling and spiritual consciousness, that a new way of experiencing love came to expression.”
Campbell
Yes.
Moyers
And it was in opposition to that ecclesiastical despotism of the heart.
Campbell
Yes.
Moyers
Which required people, particularly young girls barely out of adolescence, to marry whomever the Church or their parents wanted them to marry.
Campbell
That’s right.
Moyers
And what had this done to the passion of the heart?
Campbell
Well, the—to say a word for the other before I do this: the usual marriage in traditional cultures is arranged for by the families. It’s not a person-to-person decision at all. And this is true to this day in many parts of the world. This is not to say that in arranged marriages of this kind there is no love; there is a lot of love, there’s family love, and a rich love life on that level. So in the Middle Ages, of course, that was the kind of marriage that was sanctified by the Church. And so the idea of a real person-to-person marriage was very dangerous.
Moyers
Dangerous because it was heresy.
Campbell
It was not only heresy, it was adultery, and that was punishable by death. For instance, in the Tristan romance, that’s the crucial romance, of—
Moyers
Tristan and Isolde?
Campbell
Yes. Isolde was engaged to marry King Mark. They had never seen each other. And Tristan was sent over to fetch Isolde to Mark. And Isolde’s mother prepares a love potion, so that the two who are to be married will have real love for each other. And these two youngsters, they think the love potion is wine, and they drink it, and then they’re overtaken with this love. But Brangene, the nurse of Isolde, realized what had happened. She went to Tristan and said, “You have drunk your death.” And Tristan said, “If by my death you mean this agony of love, that is my life. If by my death you mean the punishment that we are to suffer if discovered,”—which is namely execution—“I accept that. But if by my death you mean eternal punishment in the fires of hell,”—in which these people believed—“I accept that, too.”
Moyers
That was quite…
Campbell
That’s big stuff.
Moyers
For a medieval Catholic, because they believed in a literal hell and…
Campbell
Well, these people did.
Moyers
Yes. So what’s the significance of what he was saying?
Campbell
What he was saying is that this love is bigger even than death, than pain, than anything. This is the affirmation of the pain of life in a big way.
Moyers
And I would choose this pain for love now, even though it might mean everlasting pain and damnation in hell.
Campbell
That’s right.
Moyers
And that was a marked change in how people—
Campbell
Well, that is—any life career that you choose in following your bliss should be chosen with that sense: nobody can frighten me off from this thing.
Moyers
This is sort of the beginning of the romantic idea of the Western individual taking matters into his or her own hands.
Campbell
Well, absolutely. I mean, you can see—there are examples in Oriental stories of this kind of thing, but it did not become a social system. It has now become the ideal, at any rate, of love in the Western world.
Moyers
Love from one’s own experience.
Campbell
Right. That’s a very mysterious thing, that electric thing that happens. And then the agony that can follow, which is that which the troubadours celebrate, you know, the agony of the love, the sickness that the doctors cannot cure; the wounds that can be healed only by the weapon that delivered the wound.
Moyers
Meaning?
Campbell
Well, the wound is the wound of my passion and agony of love for this creature. And the only one who can heal me is the one who delivered the blow, you know.
Moyers
So we often hurt most the person we love, and heal the hurt by the love that hurt.
Campbell
It’s something like that. That’s the paradox of the job.
Moyers
What did you mean, Joe, when you said that the triumph of Tristan’s view of love and vision of love, this beginning of romantic love in the West, was “libido over credo”?
Campbell
Well, the credo: “I believe.” And I believe not only in the laws, but I believe that these laws were instituted by God, and there’s no arguing with God. I mean, these laws are just a heavy weight on me, and disobeying those is sin, and it has to do with my eternal character.
Moyers
And the libido?
Campbell
The libido is the impulse to life.
Moyers
Comes from where?
Campbell
Comes from the heart.
Moyers
And the heart is what?
Campbell
The heart is the organ of opening up to somebody else. That’s the human quality, as opposed to the animal qualities, which have to do with, primarily, with self-interest. Opening up to that which is other is the opening of the heart. And that, as the troubadours saw it, it is the opening of the heart.
Moyers
I can certainly understand, though, why the Church was threatened by this, because how can you have a church if everyone’s libido is his or her own god?
Campbell
Why not? Why can’t the Church handle that? If you can sanctify a marriage that has been arranged, why can’t you sanctify a marriage where two people have joined each other?
Moyers
So the courage to love became the courage to affirm against tradition whatever knowledge stands confirmed in one’s own experience.
Campbell
Yeah.
Moyers
Why was that important in the evolution of the West?
Campbell
Well, it was important in that it gives the West this accent, as I’ve been saying, on the individual: that he should have faith in his experience, and not simply mouth terms that have to come to him from other mouths. I think that’s the great thing in the West. The validity of the individual’s experience of what humanity is, what life is, what values are, against the monolithic system.
Moyers
Was there some of this in the legend of the Holy Grail?
Campbell
Yes. Wolfram has a very interesting statement about the origin of the Grail. He says the Grail was brought from heaven by the neutral angels. There was the war in heaven between God and Lucifer, and the angelic hosts that sided one group with Lucifer, and the other with God. Pair of opposites: good and evil, God and Satan. The Grail was brought down through the middle, the way of the middle, by the neutral angels.
Moyers
What is the Grail representing, then?
Campbell
Well, the Grail becomes the—what can we call it?—that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives. So the story very briefly is of this—I’m giving it now as Wolfram gives it, but this is just one version. The Grail King was a lovely young man, but he had not earned that position. And the Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness. And he was a lovely young man, and he rode forth from his castle with the war cry, “Amor!” And as he’s riding forth, a Moslem, a pagan warrior, a Mohammedan warrior, comes out of the woods—a knight—and they both level their lances at each other, they drive at each other, and the lance of the Grail King kills the Mohammedan, but the Mohammedan’s lance castrates the Grail King.
What that means is that the Christian separation of matter and spirit—of the dynamism of life and the spiritual, natural grace and supernatural grace—has really castrated nature. And the European mind, the European life, has been, as it were, emasculated by this, the true spirituality, which would have come from this, has been killed. And then, what did the pagan represent? He was a person from the suburbs of Eden. He was regarded as a nature man. And on the head of his lance was written the word, “Grail.” That is to say, nature intends the grail. Spiritual life is the bouquet of natural life, not a supernatural thing imposed upon it. And so the impulses of nature are what give authenticity to life, not obeying rules come from a supernatural authority. That’s the sense of the Grail.
Moyers
And the Grail that these romantic legends were searching for is the union once again of what had been divided? The peace that comes from joining?
Campbell
The grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that has lived in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse system, which carries it between the pairs of opposites, of good and evil, light and dark. Wolfram starts his epic with a short poem saying, “Every act has both good and evil results.” Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light—that is to say, intend the light. And what the light is, is that of the harmonious relationships that come from compassion with suffering, understanding of the other person. This is what the Grail is about.
Moyers
When we say God is love, does that have anything to do with romantic love? Does mythology ever link romantic love and God?
Campbell
Well, that’s what it did do. Love was a divine visitation, and that’s why it was superior to marriage. That was the troubadour idea. If God is love, well, then love is God. Okay.
Moyers
There’s that wonderful passage in Corinthians by Paul, where he says “Love beareth all things, endureth all things.”
Campbell
Well, that’s the same business. Love knows no pain.
Moyers
And yet, one of my favorite stories of mythology is out of Persia, where there is the idea that Lucifer was condemned to hell because he loved God so much.
Campbell
Yeah, and that’s a basic Muslim idea about Iblis—that’s the Muslim name for Satan—being God’s greatest lover. Why was Satan thrown into hell? Well, the standard story is that when God created the angels, he told them to bow to none but himself. Then he created man, whom he regarded as a higher form than the angels, and he asked the angels then to serve man. And Satan would not bow to man. Now, this is interpreted in the Christian tradition, as I recall from my boyhood instruction, as being the egotism of Satan. He would not bow to man. But in this view, he could not bow to man, because of his love for God. He could bow only to God. And then God says, “Get out of my sight.” Now, the worst of the pains of hell (insofar as hell has been described) is the absence of the beloved, which is God. So how does Iblis sustain the situation in hell? By the memory of the echo of God’s voice when God said, “Go to hell.” And I think that’s a great sign of love. Do you agree?
Moyers
Well, it’s certainly true in life that the greatest hell one can know is to be separated from the one you love.
Campbell
Yeah.
Moyers
That’s why I’ve liked the Persian myth for so long: Satan as God’s lover.
Campbell
Yeah. And he is separated from God, and that’s the real pain of Satan.
Moyers
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 that to be the highest, the noblest, the boldest of the Christian teachings. Do you still feel that way?
Campbell
Well, I think the main teaching of Christianity is: “Love your enemies.”
Moyers
Hard to do.
Campbell
I know. Well, that’s it. I mean, when Peter drew his sword and cut off the servant’s ear there, in the Gethsemane affair, and Jesus said, “Put up your sword, Peter, and put the ear back on,” Peter has been drawing his sword ever since. And one can speak about Petrine or Christian Christianity in that sense. And I would say that the main doctrine of Christianity is the doctrine of Agape, of true love for him who is your enemy.
Moyers
How does one love one’s enemy without condoning what the enemy does; accepting his aggression?
Campbell
Well, I’ll tell you how to do that. “Do not pluck the mote from your enemy’s eye, but pluck the beam from your own,” do you know?
Now, I have a friend whom I met by chance; a young Buddhist monk from Tibet. You know, in 1959 the Communists crashed down and bombed the palace of the Dalai Lama, bombarded Lhasa, had people murdered, and all that kind of thing. And he escaped at the time of the Dalai Lama. And those monasteries—I mean, there were monasteries with 5,000 monks, 6,000 monks, all wiped out, tortured, and everything else. I haven’t heard one word of incrimination of the Chinese from that young man. There is absolutely no condemnation of the Chinese here. And you hear this from the Dalai Lama himself. You will not hear a word of condemnation. This recognition of the way of life through which that vitality of the spirit is moving in its own way. I mean, these men are sufferers of terrific violence, and there’s no animosity. I learned religion from them.
Moyers
Do most of the stories of mythology, from whatever culture, say that suffering is intrinsically a part of life and that there’s no way around it?
Campbell
I think I’d be willing to say that they do. I can’t think of anything now that says if you’re going to live, you won’t suffer. It’ll tell you how to understand and bear and interpret suffering—that it will do. And when the Buddha says there is escape from suffering, the escape from sorrow is nirvana—nirvana is a psychological position where you are untouched by desire and fear.
Moyers
But is that realistic? Does that happen?
Campbell
Yes, certainly.
Moyers
And your life becomes what?
Campbell
Harmonious, well-centered, and affirmative of life.
Moyers
Even with suffering.
Campbell
Exactly. There’s a passage in Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, isn’t there? “Be as Christ, for Christ did not think godhood something to be hung on to, to be clung to, but let go and came down and took life in the form of a servant, a servant even unto death.” Let’s say: come in, and accept the suffering, and affirm it.
Moyers
So you would agree with Abelard in the twelfth century, who said that Jesus’ death on the cross was not as ransom paid, as a penalty applied, but it was an act of “at-one-ment”—atonement—at one with the race.
Campbell
That’s the most sophisticated interpretation of why Christ had to be crucified. Abelard’s idea was that this—oh, this is connected with the Grail King and everything else—that the coming of Christ to be crucified, and illustrating thus the suffering of life, removes man’s mind from commitment to the things of this world in compassion. It’s in compassion with Christ that we turn to Christ. And so the injured one becomes the savior. It is the suffering that evokes the humanity of the human heart.
Moyers
So you would agree with Abelard that mankind yearning for God, and God yearning for mankind in compassion, met at that cross.
Campbell
Yes. And by contemplating the cross, you are contemplating the true mystery of life. And that love for this experience—no matter how horrific the experience—the love for it.
Moyers
So there’s joy and pain in love.
Campbell
Yeah, there is. Love, you might say, is the burning point of life. And since all life is sorrowful, so is love. And the stronger the love, the more that pain—but love bears all things. Love itself is a pain, you might say, but is the pain of being truly alive.
Intermission
Moyers
Once upon a time, so long ago it no longer matters how long ago, the feminine figure of the goddess ruled mythology as the equal of the male. The Greeks even gave her top billing. From chaos, they said—from nothing—came mother Earth, known as Gaia and sky; Uranus. They bedded, and from their coupling came six twins known as the Titans, and three giants known as cyclopedes, each with fifty heads and one hundred arms.
Uranus was disgusted and forced them to return to their mother’s womb, whereupon an indignant Gaia set out to make him pay for the insult. When Uranus came to the bedroom for his usual favors, she recruited one of their sons to make a sickle, and together they took from Uranus what he was most unwilling to give up and dropped the bloody thing in the sea. The lesson was not lost on the Greeks: it isn’t nice to fool with mother nature.
Joseph Campbell liked that story and told it to me when we were talking one day about how patriarchal authority finally drove the goddess from the pantheon of imagination. Somehow, the old gods figured that if they wanted to control the world, they had to change the metaphors, and the goddess had to go. She remained a symbol of fertility crucial to humanity’s survival, but no equal except rarely in the exercise of power. The repercussions have played out down the centuries and are still with us.
We return now to our conversation.
Part 2
Moyers
The Lord’s Prayer begins, “Our Father which art in heaven.”
Campbell
Yes.
Moyers
Could it have begun, “Our Mother”?
Campbell
This is a metaphorical image, this is a symbolic image. And to make the point that it’s not your father, your physical father, we have “Our Father who art in heaven.” But heaven, again, is a symbolic idea, where would it, heaven, be? It is no place. All of the references of religious and mythological images are to planes of consciousness or fields of experience potential in the human spirit. And these are to evoke attitudes and experiences that are appropriate to a meditation on the mystery of the source of your own being, I would say. So there have been systems of religion where the mother is the prime parent, the source. And she’s really a more immediate parent than the father, because one is born from the mother, and then the first experience of any infant is the mother, so that the image of woman is the image of the world. You might say that mythology is simply a translation of the world into a mother image. We talk of Mother Earth and so forth.
Moyers
But what happened along the way, Joe, to this reverence that in primitive societies was directed toward the goddess figure, the great goddess, the Mother Earth? What happened to that?
Campbell
That comes in primarily with agriculture and the agricultural societies.
Moyers
Fertility and all of that?
Campbell
It has to do with the earth. The human woman does give birth as the earth gives birth to the plants. She gives nourishment, as the plants do. So woman magic and earth magic are the same. They are related. And the personification, then, of this energy which gives birth to forms and nourishes forms is properly female. And so it is in the agricultural world of ancient Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Nile, but also in the earlier planting culture systems, that the goddess is the mythic form that is dominant.
Moyers
Because of this obvious perception of creation, issue, fertility.
Campbell
That’s right. And when you have a goddess as the creator, it’s her own very body that is the universe. She is identical with the universe. And in Egypt you have the mother heavens—Nut; the goddess Nut—who is represented as the whole heavenly sphere.
Moyers
I was really taken when we went to 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. There’s one scene of her swallowing the sun.
Campbell
The idea is that she swallows the sun in the west and gives birth to the sun in the east, and it passes through her body at night. And so she is the heavens.
Moyers
So it would be natural for people trying to explain the wonders of the universe to look to the female figure as the explanation for what they saw in their own lives.
Campbell
Not only that, but then when you move to a philosophical point of view, the female represents what in Kantian terminology we call the forms of sensibility. The female represents time and space itself. She is time and space. And the mystery beyond her is beyond pairs of opposites. So it isn’t male and it isn’t female, it neither is nor isn’t, but everything is within her—so that the gods are her children. Everything you can think of, everything you can see, is the production of the goddess.
Oh, this is a wonderful story. The Vedic gods are together, and they see a strange sort of amorphous thing down the way, like a kind of smoky fog. And they say, “What’s that?” They don’t know what it is. And Agni, the god of fire, says, “I’ll go find out who that is.” So he goes up to this smoky thing and he says, “Who are you?” And from the smoky thing the voice says, “Who are you?” And he says, “I’m Agni. I’m the lord of fire. I can burn anything.” And out of the fog there comes a piece of straw, it falls on the ground, it says, “Let’s see you burn that.” He can’t burn it. He goes back, he says, “This is strange.” Well, Vayu, the lord of winds, says, ”I’ll try.” So he goes. And the same thing: “I can blow anything around.” Throws it down, “Now, let’s see you blow that” Well, he can’t. He goes back. Then a woman arrives; a beautiful, mysterious, mystic woman. And she instructs the gods and tells them who that is. “That is the ultimate mystery of being, from which you boys have received your strength. And he can turn it on or off for you,” you know. And there she comes as the one who illuminates the gods themselves concerning the ultimate ground of their own being.
Moyers
It’s the female wisdom.
Campbell
It’s the female as the giver of forms. She is the one who gave the forms and she knows where they came from.
Moyers
I wonder what it would have meant to us if somewhere along the way we had begun the prayer “Our Mother,” instead of “Our Father.” What psychological difference would it have made?
Campbell
Well, it makes a psychological difference in the character of the cultures. You have the basic birth of civilization in the Near East with the great river valleys then as the main source areas—the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, and then over in India the Indus valley, and later the Ganges. This is the world of the goddess: all these rivers have goddess names finally.
Then there come the invasions. These fighting people are herding people. The Semites are herders of goats and sheep, and the Indo-Europeans of cattle. They were formerly the hunters. They translate a hunting mythology into a herding mythology, but it’s animal oriented. And when you have hunters you have killers, and when you have herders you have killers, because they’re always in movement, nomadic, coming into conflict with other people, and they have to conquer the area they move into. This comes into the Near East, and this brings in the warrior gods like Zeus, like Yahweh.
Moyers
The sword and death, instead of fertility.
Campbell
Right. Particularly the Hebrews. They really wipe out the goddess. The term for the goddess, the Canaanite goddess, that’s used in the Old Testament is “the abomination.” And so many of the Hebrew kings are condemned in the Old Testament for having worshiped down the mountaintops. That’s the goddess. And there was a very strong accent against the goddess in the Hebrew, which you do not find in the Indo-European. There you have Zeus marrying the goddess, and then the two play together. I think it’s an extreme case that we have in the Bible. And our own Western subjugation of the female is really, I think, a function of biblical thinking.
Moyers
Because when you substitute the male for the female, you get a different psychology, a different cultural bias.
Campbell
Particularly if you cut the female out and don’t have any—I mean, if the male is on top, like this, and the female is the subordinate all the way, you have a totally different system from that when the two are facing each other.
Moyers
And it’s permissible in your culture to do what your gods do, so you just—
Campbell
Well, that’s exactly it. So I would see three situations here. One: the early one of the sheer goddess, when the male is hardly a significant divinity, you see. She is the total thing. And then this other one of the Hebrew, of the male the total thing; in fact, he takes over her role. And finally, then, the classical one where the two are in interaction.
Moyers
There are women today who say that the spirit of the goddess has been in exile for 5,000 years, since the events that you—
Campbell
Well, not that—you can’t put it that far back. 5,000 years. She was a very potent figure in Hellenistic times in the Mediterranean. And she came back with the Virgin in the Roman Catholic tradition. I mean, you don’t have a tradition with the goddess celebrated any more beautifully and marvelously than in the twelfth and thirteenth century French cathedrals, every one of which is called Notre Dame.
Moyers
What about the virgin birth? Suddenly the goddess reappears in the form of the chaste and pure vessel chosen for God’s action.
Campbell
Well, in the history of Western religions, this is an extremely interesting development. The virgin birth comes in by way of the Greek tradition. When you read your four gospels, the only one with the virgin birth in it is the gospel according to Luke, and Luke was a Greek.
Moyers
And there was in the Greek tradition images, legends, myths of virgin births?
Campbell
All of them. I mean, Leda and the swan, and Persephone and the serpent, and this one and that one and the other one. The virgin birth is represented throughout.
Moyers
This was not a new idea, then, in Bethlehem and—
Campbell
No. What is the meaning of the virgin birth? In India, there is this system of the kundalini, as it’s called: the idea of the centers, the psychological centers, up the spine. And they represent the psychological planes of concern and consciousness and action. The first is at the rectum, and this is that of alimentation. The serpent represents this, you know; a traveling esophagus going along just eating, eating, eating, eating. And all of us, we wouldn’t be here if we weren’t eating. And then the second center is at the sex organ center, and that’s the urge to procreation. The third center is at the navel, and this is where you eat and want to consume. And it’s not the alimentary eating, it’s the mastering and smashing and trashing of others, do you see? This is the aggressive mood.
Now, the first is an animal instinct, the second is an animal instinct, the third is an animal instinct, and these three centers are located in the pelvic base, do you see? The next one is at the level of the heart, and this is the opening of compassion. And there you move out of the field of animal action into a field that is properly human and spiritual.
Now, in each of these centers there is a symbolic form. At the base, the first one, there is the form of the lingam and yoni, the male and female organs in conjunction. At the heart chakra, there is again the male and female organs in conjunction, but in gold. This is the virgin birth. It’s the birth of spiritual man out of the animal man. Do you understand?
Moyers
And it happens…?
Campbell
When you are awakened at the level of the heart to compassion and to suffering with the other person. That’s the beginning of humanity. And the meditations of religion, properly, are on that level, the heart level.
Moyers
You say it’s the beginning of humanity, but in these stories that’s the moment when gods are born. The virgin birth, it’s a god who emerges from that chemistry.
Campbell
Yeah, and you know who that god is? It’s you. All of these symbols in mythology refer to you. You can get stuck out there and think it’s all out there, and so you’re thinking of Jesus and all the sentiments about how he suffered and all—what that suffering is is what ought to be going on in you. Have you been reborn? Have you died to your animal nature and come to life as a human incarnation?
Moyers
Why is it significant that this is of a virgin?
Campbell
Well, it is that the begetter is the spirit. It is a spiritual birth. The virgin conceived of the word, but through the ear.
Moyers
The Wwwd came like a shaft of light.
Campbell
Yes. And now, the Buddha was born from his mother’s side, at the level of the heart chakra. That’s a symbolic birth. He wasn’t born from his mother’s side—but symbolically he was.
Moyers
But the Christ came the way you and I come.
Campbell
Yes, but of a virgin.
Moyers
Which is a power greater than—
Campbell
And then, according to Roman Catholic doctrine, her virginity was restored. So nothing happened physically, you might say. It’s not a physical birth. It’s symbolic of a spiritual transformation, that’s what the virgin birth is about. And so deities are born that way who represent beings who act in terms of compassion, and not in terms of the lower three centers.
Moyers
If you go back into antiquity, do you find images of the Madonna as the mother of the savior child?
Campbell
Well, what you have as the model for the Madonna actually is Isis, with her child Horus at her breast. This was the actual model for the Madonna symbol.
Moyers
Isis? Tell me that story.
Campbell
This is a prime myth in this period of the goddess as the redeemer: the one who goes in quest of the lost spouse or lover and, through her loyalty and descent into the realm of death, recovers him. Isis and her husband Osiris were twins who were born of the goddess Nut. And their younger relatives were Seth and Nephthys, who were also twins born from Nut. Seth planned to kill his brother Osiris, and he took Osiris’s measurements secretly and had a wonderful sarcophagus built that would exactly fit Osiris. So there was a hilarious party in progress one time among the gods, and Seth trots in this sarcophagus, and he says, “Anyone whom this perfectly fits can have it as his sarcophagus.” And everybody at the party tried, and when Osiris got in, of course he perfectly fit. Just at that time, 72 accomplices come rushing out and they clap the lid on, strap it together, and throw it in the Nile.
Now, this is the death of the god. Whenever you have a death of an incarnation, a god like this, you’re going to have a resurrection, you can wait for that. So he goes floating down the Nile and is washed ashore in Syria. And a beautiful tree grows up and incorporates the sarcophagus in its own trunk. So this is this wonderful tree with a glorious aroma. And the local king has just had a son born to him, and he is also at the same time going to build a palace. The aroma of this tree is so wonderful, he cuts it down and brings it in to be a central pillar in the main room of the palace.
Poor little Isis, whose husband has been thrown into the Nile, starts this wonderful quest for Osiris. So she comes to the place where the palace is and learns of the wonderful aroma, and she suspects this is Osiris. And she gets a job as nurse to the just-born little child. Well, she lets the child nurse from her finger. And she loves the little child, and she decides to give it immortality. So she does this by placing him in the fireplace, in the fire, to burn away gradually his mortal body. But, being a goddess, she could keep that from killing him, you understand. And when that would happen, she would convert herself into a swallow, and fly mournfully around the pillar where her husband is.
Well, one evening the child’s mother came in to this room while this scene was in progress, saw her child in the fireplace, let out a scream. And that broke the spell, and they had to rescue the child from incineration. Meanwhile, the swallow had turned into this gorgeous nurse, Isis, and the nurse gave an explanation of the situation, and she said, “By the way, it’s my husband that’s in that pillar there, and I’d he grateful if you could just let me take it home.” So the king came in and he said, “Certainly.” So he removes the pillar, gives it to Isis, and it’s put on a barge. So on the way back to the Nile, she removes the lid, the cover of the sarcophagus, and lies on top of her dead spouse and conceives of her dead spouse—this is an image that occurs in Egyptian art all the time: out of death comes life, and all this kind of business—sand when they land she, in the papyrus swamp, gives birth to her child Horus with the dead Osiris beside her.
This is the motif for the Madonna, actually; it becomes the Madonna. In Egyptian symbology, Isis represents the throne: the Pharaoh sits on the throne of Isis, as the child sits on the mother’s lap. And when you look in the cathedral of Chartres, in the west portal, you will see the Madonna as the throne with the little child Jesus as the world emperor on her lap: that is the same image that’s come over.
Moyers
And you say the Christian fathers took this image?
Campbell
Definitely, and they really say so. You read the second letter of Peter, and he says: those forms, which were merely mythological forms in the past, are now incarnate and actual in our savior. There was a mythology of the savior, the dead and resurrected god, and it’s associated with the moon, which dies and is resurrected every month. And you have the three nights dark, and you have Christ three nights in the tomb, and three days in the tomb, and all this kind of thing. It’s an intentional saying: that which was merely talked about is now fact. And no one knows what the date of Christmas ought to be, but it’s put on the date of the winter solstice, when the nights begin to be shorter and the days longer: the birth of light. And so there is an idea of death to the past and birth to the future in our lives and in our thinking all the time. Death to the animal nature, birth to the spiritual, and these symbols are talking about it one way or another.
Moyers
So when the—
Campbell
And the goddess is the one who brings it about. The second birth is through the second mother. Notre Dame de Paris, Notre Dame de Chartres: “our mother church.” We are reborn by entering and leaving a church.
Moyers
And it doesn’t mean physically, it means…
Campbell
Spiritually.
Moyers
That there’s a power that’s unique to the feminine principle.
Campbell
It can be put that way. You can—it’s not necessarily unique to her. You can have rebirth through the male, also. But using this system of symbols, the woman becomes the regenerator.
Moyers
There’s that wonderful saying in the New Testament of Jesus. “In Jesus there is no male or female.” In the ultimate sense of things there is neither.
Campbell
That would have to be. I mean, if Jesus represents the source of our being, we are all, as it were, thoughts in the mind of Jesus. He is the word that has become flesh in us, too.
Moyers
You and I would possess characteristics that are both male and female.
Campbell
Well, actually the body does. But sometime in the fetal period it becomes apparent that this is going be male and this is going to be female. Meanwhile, it's a kind of neutral body with the potentialities for either inflection.
Moyers
So all through life we are honoring or suppressing one or the other.
Campbell
And in that yin-yang figure from China—you know, in the dark fish (or whatever you want to call it) there’s a light spot, and in the light one there’s a dark spot. That’s how they can relate. You couldn’t relate at all to something of which you did not participate, into which you did not participate at all. That’s why the idea of God as the absolute Other is a ridiculous idea. There could be no relationship to that which is absolute other.
Moyers
The question arises in discussing the male-female principle, the virgin birth, the spiritual power that gives us the second birth. The wise people of all time have said that we can live the good life if we learn, in fact, to live spiritually. But how does one learn to live spiritually when one is of the flesh? Remember, Paul said, “the desires of the flesh are against the spirit, and the desires of the spirit are against the flesh.” How do we learn to live spiritually?
Campbell
Well, that was, in ancient times and in primitive times, the business of the teacher. He was to give you the clues to a spiritual life. That was what the priest was for. Also, that was what the ritual was for. A ritual can be defined as an enactment of a myth. By participating in a good, sound ritual, you are actually experiencing a mythological life. And it’s out of that that one can learn to live spiritually.
Moyers
These stories of mythology actually point the way to the spiritual life.
Campbell
Yes. You’ve got to have a clue. You’ve got to have a road map of some kind. And these are all around us. They’re here.
Moyers
And the road map to which the goddess stories are pointing is the map of elevating the spiritual to an equality with the physical, so that you live in union with those two.
Campbell
Yes. There you’ve come to the real sanctity of the earth itself, because that is the body of the goddess. When Yahweh creates, he creates the earth and breathes his life into it. He’s not there, she’s there. Your body is her body. And there’s that kind of identity.
Moyers
Well, that’s why I’m not so sure that the future of the race and the salvation of the journey is in space. I think it is well right here on earth, in the body, in the womb of all of our being.
Campbell
Well, it certainly is. I mean, when you go out into space, what you’re carrying is your body. And if that hasn’t been transformed, space won’t transform it for you. But thinking about space may help you to realize something.
Moyers
You certainly thought about space in this wonderful passage. You were describing a page out of the National Geographic Atlas of the World, but you read this and something happened to you.
Campbell
“What these pages opened to me was the vision of a universe of unimaginable magnitude and inconceivable violence. Billions upon billions, literally, of roaring thermonuclear furnaces scattering from each other, each thermonuclear furnace being a star, and our sun among them. Many of them actually blowing themselves to pieces, littering the outermost reaches of space with dust and gas, out of which new stars with circling planets are being born right now. And then, from still more remote distances beyond all these, there come murmurs—microwaves, which are echoes of the greatest cataclysmic explosion of all, namely the Big Bang of creation, which, according to recent reckonings, must have occurred some 18 billion years ago.”
That’s where we are, kiddo. And if you realized that, you realize how really important you are, you know: one little microbit in this great magnitude. And then out of that must come the experience that you and that are in some sense one, and that you partake of all of that.
Moyers
And it begins here.
Campbell
It begins here.