MOYERS: And the other cultures?
CAMPBELL: They don’t stress the beauty of youth to that extent.
MOYERS: You say that the image of death is the beginning of mythology. What do you mean?
CAMPBELL: The earliest evidence of anything like mythological thinking is associated with graves.
MOYERS: And they suggest that men and women saw life, and then they didn’t see it, so they wondered about it?
CAMPBELL: It must have been something like that. You only have to imagine what your own experience would be. The grave burials with their weapons and sacrifices to ensure a continued life—these certainly suggest that there was a person who was alive and warm before you who is now lying there, cold, and beginning to rot. Something was there that isn’t there. Where is it now?
MOYERS: When do you think humans first discovered death?
CAMPBELL: They first discovered death when they were first humans, because they died. Now, animals have the experience of watching their companions dying. But, as far as we know, they have no further thoughts about it. And there is no evidence that humans thought about death in a significant way until the Neanderthal period, when weapons and animal sacrifices occur with burials.
MOYERS: What did these sacrifices represent?
CAMPBELL: That I wouldn’t know.
MOYERS: Only a guess.
CAMPBELL: I try not to guess. You know, we have a tremendous amount of information about this subject, but there is a place where the information stops. And until you have writing, you don’t know what people were thinking. All you have are significant remains of one kind or another. You can extrapolate backward, but that is dangerous. However, we do know that burials always involve the idea of the continued life beyond the visible one, of a plane of being that is behind the visible plane, and that is somehow supportive of the visible one to which we have to relate. I would say that is the basic theme of all mythology—that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one.
MOYERS: What we don’t know supports what we do know.
CAMPBELL: Yes. And this idea of invisible support is connected with one’s society, too. Society was there before you, it is there after you are gone, and you are a member of it. The myths that link you to your social group, the tribal myths, affirm that you are an organ of the larger organism. Society itself is an organ of a larger organism, which is the landscape, the world in which the tribe moves. The main theme in ritual is the linking of the individual to a larger morphological structure than that of his own physical body.
Man lives by killing, and there is a sense of guilt connected with that. Burials suggest that my friend has died, and he survives. The animals that I have killed must also survive. Early hunters usually had a kind of animal divinity—the technical name would be the animal master, the animal who is the master animal. The animal master sends the flocks to be killed.
You see, the basic hunting myth is of a kind of covenant between the animal world and the human world. The animal gives its life willingly, with the understanding that its life transcends its physical entity and will be returned to the soil or to the mother through some ritual of restoration. And this ritual of restoration is associated with the main hunting animal. To the Indians of the American plains, it was the buffalo. On the Northwest coast the great festivals have to do with the run of salmon coming in. When you go to South Africa, the eland, the magnificent antelope, is the principal animal.
MOYERS: And the principal animal is—
CAMPBELL: —is the one that furnishes the food.
MOYERS: So in the early hunting societies there grew up between human beings and animals a bonding that required one to be consumed by the other.
CAMPBELL: That is the way life is. Man is a hunter, and the hunter is a beast of prey. In the myths, the beast of prey and the animal who is preyed upon play two significant roles. They represent two aspects of life—the aggressive, killing, conquering, creating aspect of life, and the one that is the matter or, you might say, the subject matter.
MOYERS: Life itself. What happens in the relationship between the hunter and the hunted?
CAMPBELL: As we know from the life of the Bushmen and from the relation of the native Americans to the buffalo, it is one of reverence, of respect. For example, the Bushmen of Africa live in a desert world. It’s a very hard life, and the hunt in such an environment is a very difficult hunt. There is very little wood for massive, powerful bows. The Bushmen have tiny little bows, and the extent of the arrow’s flight is hardly more than thirty yards. The arrow has a very weak penetration. It can hardly do more than break the animal’s skin. But the Bushmen apply a prodigiously powerful poison to the point of the arrow so that these beautiful animals, the elands, die in pain over a day and a half. After the animal has been shot and is dying painfully of the poison, the hunters have to fulfill certain taboos of not doing this and not doing that in a kind of “participation mystique,” a mystical participation in the death of the animal, whose meat has become their life, and whose death they have brought about. There’s an identification, a mythological identification. Killing is not simply slaughter, it’s a ritual act, as eating is when you say grace before meals. A ritual act is a recognition of your dependency on the voluntary giving of this food to you by the animal who has given its life. The hunt is a ritual.
MOYERS: And a ritual expresses a spiritual reality.
CAMPBELL: It expresses that this is in accord with the way of nature, not simply with my own personal impulse.
I am told that when the Bushmen tell their animal stories, they actually mimic the mouth formations of the different animals, pronouncing the words as though the animals themselves were pronouncing them. They had an intimate knowledge of these creatures, and friendly neighborly relationships.
And then they killed some of them for food. I know ranch people who have a pet cow in addition to their ranch animals. They won’t eat the meat of that cow because there is a kind of cannibalism in eating the meat of a friend. But the aborigines were eating the meat of their friends all the time. Some kind of psychological compensation has to be achieved, and the myths help in doing that.
MOYERS: How?
CAMPBELL: These early myths help the psyche to participate without a sense of guilt or fright in the necessary act of life.
MOYERS: And these great stories consistently refer to this dynamic in one way or the other—the hunt, the hunter, the hunted, and the animal as friend, as a messenger from God.
CAMPBELL: Right. Normally the animal preyed upon becomes the animal that is the messenger of the divine.
MOYERS: And you wind up as the hunter killing the messenger.
CAMPBELL: Killing the god.
MOYERS: Does that cause guilt?
CAMPBELL: No, guilt is what is wiped out by the myth. Killing the animal is not a personal act. You are performing the work of nature.
MOYERS: Guilt is wiped out by the myth?
CAMPBELL: Yes.
MOYERS: But you must at times feel some reluctance upon closing in for the kill. You don’t really want to kill that animal.
CAMPBELL: The animal is the father. You know what the Freudians say, that the first enemy is the father, if you are a man. If you are a boy, every enemy is potentially, psychologically associated with the father image.
MOYERS: Do you think that the animal became the father image of God?
CAMPBELL: Yes. It is a fact that the religious attitude toward the principal animal is one of reverence and respect, and not only that—submission to the inspiration of that animal. The animal is the one that brings the gifts—tobacco, the mystical pipe, and so on.
MOYERS: Do you think this troubled early man—to kill the animal that is a god, or the messenger of a god?
CAMPBELL: Absolutely—that is why you have the rites.
MOYERS: What kind of rites?
CAMPBELL: Rituals of appeasement and of thanks to the animal. For example, when the bear is killed, there is a ceremony of
feeding the bear a piece of its own flesh. And then there will be a little ceremony with the bear’s skin placed over a kind of rack, as though he were present—and he is present, he serves his own meat for dinner. A fire is burning—and the fire is the goddess. Then there is a conversation between the mountain god, which is the bear, and the fire goddess.
MOYERS: What do they say?
CAMPBELL: Who knows? No one hears them, but there is a little socializing going on there.
MOYERS: If the cave bears were not appeased, the animals wouldn’t appear, and the primitive hunters would starve to death. They began to perceive some kind of power on which they were dependent, a power greater than their own.
CAMPBELL: Yes. That is the power of the animal master, the willingness of the animals to participate in this game. You find among hunting people all over the world a very intimate, appreciative relationship to the principal food animal. Now, when we sit down to a meal, we thank God for giving us the food. These people thanked the animal.
MOYERS: So appeasing the animal with this ritual honoring the animal would be like bribing the butcher at the supermarket.
CAMPBELL: No, I don’t think it would be bribing at all. It is thanking a friend for cooperating in a mutual relationship. And if you didn’t thank him, the species would become offended.
There are rituals that have been described for killing animals. Before the hunter goes to kill, he will draw on the hilltop a picture of the animal that he is about to kill. And that hilltop will be in such a place that the first rays of the rising sun will strike it. When the sun rises, the hunter is waiting there with a little team of people to perform the rites. And when the light strikes the animal picture, the hunter’s arrow flies right along that light beam and hits the drawn animal, and the woman who is present to assist him raises her hands and shouts. Then the hunter goes out and kills the animal. And the arrow will be just where it was in the picture. The next morning when the sun rises, the hunter erases the animal. This is something that was done in the name of the natural order, not in the name of his personal intention.
Now, there is another story from a totally different sphere of society, of the samurai, the Japanese warrior, who had the duty to avenge the murder of his overlord. When he cornered the man who had murdered his overlord, and he was about to deal with him with his samurai sword, the man in the corner, in the passion of terror, spat in the warrior’s face. And the warrior sheathed the sword and walked away.
MOYERS: Why?
CAMPBELL: Because he was made angry, and if he had killed that man in anger, then it would have been a personal act. And he had come to do another kind of act, an impersonal act of vengeance.
MOYERS: Do you think this kind of impersonality played some part in the psyche of the hunter on the Great Plains?
CAMPBELL: Yes, definitely. Because isn’t it a moral problem to kill somebody and eat that person? You see, these people didn’t think of animals the way we do, as some subspecies. Animals are our equals at least, and sometimes our superiors.
The animal has powers that the human doesn’t have. The shaman, for instance, will often have an animal familiar, that is to say, the spirit of some animal species that will be his support and his teacher.
MOYERS: But if humans begin to be able to imagine and see beauty and create beauty out of the relationship, then they become superior to the animals, do they not?
CAMPBELL: Well, I don’t think they are thinking as much about superiority as equality. They ask the animals for advice, and the animal becomes the model for how to live. In that case, it is superior. And sometimes the animal becomes the giver of a ritual, as in the legends of the origins of the buffalo. For example, you can see this equality in the basic legend of the Blackfoot tribe, which is the origin legend of their buffalo dance rituals by which they invoke the cooperation of the animals in this play of life.
MOYERS: What was that?
CAMPBELL: Well, this story arises from the problem of how you find food for a large tribal group. One way of acquiring meat for the winter would be to drive a buffalo herd over a rock cliff so that they would all tumble over and could be slaughtered easily at the foot of the cliff. This is known as a buffalo fall.
This story is of a Blackfoot tribe, long, long ago, who couldn’t get the buffalo to go over the cliff. The buffalo would approach the cliff and then turn aside. So it looked as though the tribe wasn’t going to have any meat for that winter.
One day, the daughter of one of the houses got up early in the morning to draw the water for the family and happened to look up to the cliff. There on the cliff were the buffalo. And she said, “Oh, if you would only come over, I would marry one of you.”
To her surprise, they all began coming over. Now, that was surprise number one. Surprise number two was when one of the old buffalo, the shaman of the herd, comes and says, “All right, girlie, off we go.”
“Oh, no,” she says.
“Oh, yes,” he says, “you made your promise. We’ve kept our side of the bargain. Look at all my relatives here—dead. Now off we go.”
Well, the family gets up in the morning and they look around, and where is Minnehaha? The father looks around on the ground—you know how Indians are, he can see by the footprints—and he says, “She’s gone off with a buffalo. And I’m going to get her back.”
So he puts on his walking moccasins, his bow and arrow, and so forth, and goes out over the plains. He has gone quite a distance when he feels he better sit down and rest. So he sits down, and he is thinking about what he should do now, when along comes the magpie, one of those clever birds that has shamanic qualities.
MOYERS: Magical qualities.
CAMPBELL: Yes. And the Indian says to him, “O beautiful bird, did my daughter run away with a buffalo? Have you seen her? Would you hunt around and see if you can find her out on the plains somewhere?”
And the magpie says, “Well, there is a lovely girl with the buffalo right now, over there, just a bit away.”
“Well,” says the man, “will you go tell her that her daddy is here at the buffalo wallow?”
So the magpie flies over and finds the girl who is there among the buffalo. They’re all asleep, and she is knitting or something of the kind. And the magpie comes over, and he says, “Your father is over at the wallow waiting for you.”
“Oh,” she says, “this is terrible. This is very dangerous. These buffalo are going to kill us. You tell him to wait, and I’ll be over. I’ll try to work this out.”
Now, her buffalo husband is behind her, and he wakes up and takes off his horn, and says, “Go to the wallow and get me a drink.”
So she takes the horn and goes over, and there is her father. He grabs her by the arm and says, “Come!”
But she says, “No, no, no! This is real danger. The whole herd will be right after us. I have to work this thing out. Now, let me just go back.”
So she gets the water and goes back. And the buffalo says, “Fe, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Indian”—you know, that sort of thing. And she says, no, nothing of the kind. And he says, “Yes indeed!” And he gives a buffalo bellow, and all the buffalo get up, and they all do a slow buffalo dance with tails raised, and they go over, and they trample that poor man to death, so that he disappears entirely. He is just all broken up to pieces. All gone. The girl is crying, and her buffalo husband says, “So you are crying.”
“Yes,” she says, “he is my daddy.”
“Well,” he says, “but what about us? There are our children, at the bottom of the cliff, our wives, our parents—and you cry about your daddy.” Well, apparently he was a kind of compassionate buffalo, and he said, “Okay, if you can bring your daddy back to life again, I will let you go.”
So she turns to the magpie and says, “Please pick around a little bit and see if you can find a bit of Daddy.” And the magpie does so, and he comes up finally with a vertebra, just one little bone. And the girl says, “That’s enough.” And she puts the bone down on the
ground and covers it with her blanket and sings a revivifying song, a magical song with great power. And presently—yes, there is a man under the blanket. She looks. “That’s Daddy all right!” But he is not breathing yet. She sings a few more stanzas of whatever the song was, and he stands up.
The buffalo are amazed. And they say, “Well, why don’t you do this for us? We’ll teach you our buffalo dance, and when you will have killed our families, you do this dance and sing this song, and we will all come back to live again.”
And that is the basic idea—that through the ritual that dimension is reached that transcends temporality and out of which life comes and back into which it goes.
MOYERS: What happened a hundred years ago when the white man came and slaughtered this animal of reverence?
CAMPBELL: That was a sacramental violation. You can see in many of the early nineteenth-century paintings by George Catlin of the Great Western Plains in his day literally hundreds of thousands of buffalo all over the place. And then, through the next half century, the frontiersmen, equipped with repeating rifles, shot down whole herds, taking only the skins to sell and leaving the bodies there to rot. This was a sacrilege.
MOYERS: It turned the buffalo from a “thou”—
CAMPBELL: —to an “it.”
MOYERS: The Indians addressed the buffalo as “thou,” an object of reverence.
CAMPBELL: The Indians addressed all of life as a “thou”—the trees, the stones, everything. You can address anything as a “thou,” and if you do it, you can feel the change in your own psychology. The ego that sees a “thou” is not the same ego that sees an “it.” And when you go to war with people, the problem of the newspapers is to turn those people into “its.”
MOYERS: This happens in marriage, too, doesn’t it? And happens with children, too.
CAMPBELL: Sometimes the “thou” turns into an “it,” and you don’t know what the relationship is. The Indian relationship to animals is in contrast to our relationship to animals, where we see animals as a lower form of life. In the Bible we are told that we are the masters. For hunting people, as I said, the animal is in many ways superior. A Pawnee Indian said: “In the beginning of all things, wisdom and knowledge were with the animal. For Tirawa, the One Above, did not speak directly to man. He sent certain animals to tell mankind that he showed himself through the beast. And that from them, and from the stars and the sun and the moon, man should learn.”