In this hour, one of the many I taped with Joseph Campbell during the last two years of his life, we talked about our relationship to the first stories and to the people who told them. In his words, “Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the mumbo jumbo of some witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture translations from sonnets of Lao-tze, or now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Thomas Aquinas, or catch suddenly the shining meaning of a bizarre Eskimo fairy tale, we’re hearing echoes of the first story.”
Campbell’s odyssey as scholar and teacher led him from the exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History, which impressed him as a boy, to cultures all over the world. For him, mythic stories were not simply entertaining tales to be told for amusement around ancient campfires, they were powerful guides to the life of the spirit. Joseph Campbell devoted his life to the study of these myths and rituals. And the hunters performed rituals of atonement to the departed spirits of the animals, hoping to coax them hack to be sacrificed again. They told stories to themselves about the animals, and about the supernatural world to which the animals seemed to go when they died. Whatever the inward darkness may have been to which the shamans of those’ caves descended in their trances, the same must lie within ourselves nightly visited in sleep.īILL MOYERS: When we look at the magnificent cave paintings left by our primal ancestors, we realize how the hunters of those early tribes were influenced by their natural surroundings, and by their feelings toward the animals they depended on for food religious feelings. And again they wake with a sense of recognition when we enter any one of those great painted caves. Memories of their animal envoys still must sleep, somehow, within us, for they wake a little and stir when we venture into wilderness. Neither in body nor mind do we inhabit the world of those hunting races of the Paleolithic millennia, to whose lives and lifeways we nevertheless owed the very forms of our bodies and structures of our minds.
Man is no longer the newcomer in a world of unexplored plains and forests, and our immediate neighbors are not wild beasts, but other human beings contending for goods and space on a planet that is whirling without end around the fireball of a star. Bears, lions, elephants and gazelles are in cages in our zoos. JOSEPH CAMPBELL (reading): The animal envoys of the Unseen Power no longer serve, as in primeval times, to teach and to guide mankind. Released in 1988, The Power of Myth was one of the most popular TV series in the history of public television, and continues to inspire new audiences.
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