History Forum / General / General Topics / May 2006

The Power of Myth
by Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385418868/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell

CAMPBELL: It [lack of central mythology] says to me that they
[contemporary Christians] don't know how to apply their religious ideas
to contemporary life, and to human beings rather than just to their own
community. It's a terrible example of the failure of religion to meet
the modern world. These three mythologies are fighting it out. They
have disqualified themselves for the future.

MOYERS: What kind of new myth do we need?

CAMPBELL: We need myths that will identify the individual not with his
local group but with the planet. A model for that is the United States.
Here were thirteen different little colony nations that decided to act
in the mutual interest, without disregarding the individual interests
of any one of them.

MOYERS: There is something about that on the Great Seal of the
UnitedStates.

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CAMPBELL: That's what the Great Seal is all about. I carry a copy of
the Great Seal in my pocket in the form of a dollar bill. Here is the
statement of the ideals that brought about the formation of the United
States. Look at this dollar bill. Now here is the Great Seal of the
United States. Look at the pyramid on the left. A pyramid has four
sides. These are the four points of the compass. There is somebody at
this point, there's somebody at that point, and there's somebody at
this point. When you're down on the lower levels of this pyramid, you
will be either on one side or on the other. But when you get up to the
top, the points all come together, and there the eye of God opens.

MOYERS: And to them it was the god of reason.

CAMPBELL: Yes. This is the first nation in the world that was ever
established on the basis of reason instead of simply warfare. These
were eighteenth-century deists, these gentlemen. Over here we read, "In
God We Trust." But that is not the god of the Bible. These men did not
believe in a Fall. They did not think the mind of man was cut off from
God. The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal
concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection
of the rational mind of God. Reason puts you in touch with God.
Consequently, for these men, there is no special revelation anywhere,
and none is needed, because the mind of man cleared of its
fallibilities is sufficiently capable of the knowledge of God. All
people in the world are thus capable because all people in the world
are capable of reason.

All men are capable of reason. That is the fundamental principle of
democracy. Because everybody's mind is capable of true knowledge, you
don't have to have a special authority, or a special revelation telling
you that this is the way things should be.

MOYERS: And yet these symbols come from mythology.

CAMPBELL: Yes, but they come from a certain quality of mythology. It's
not the mythology of a special revelation. The Hindus, for example,
don't believe in special revelation. They speak of a state in which the
ears have opened to the song of the universe. Here the eye has opened
to the radiance of the mind of God. And that's a fundamental deist
idea. Once you reject the idea of the Fall in the Garden, man is not
cut off from his source.

Now back to the Great Seal. When you count the number of ranges on this
pyramid, you find there are thirteen. And when you come to the bottom,
there is an inscription in Roman numerals. It is, of course, 1776.
Then, when you add one and seven and seven and six, you get twenty-one,
which is the age of reason, is it not? It was in 1776 that the thirteen
states declared independence. The number thirteen is the number of
transformation and rebirth. At the Last Supper there were twelve
apostles and one Christ, who was going to die and be reborn. Thirteen
is the number of getting out of the field of the bounds of twelve into
the transcendent. You have the twelve signs of the zodiac and the sun.
These men were very conscious of the number thirteen as the number of
resurrection and rebirth and new life, and they played it up here all
the way through.

MOYERS: But, as a practical matter, there were thirteen states.

CAMPBELL: Yes, but wasn't that symbolic? This is not simply
coincidental. This is the thirteen states as themselves symbolic of
what they were.

MOYERS: That would explain the other inscription down there, "Novus Or
do Sedorum."

CAMPBELL: "A new order of the world." This is a new order of the world.
And the saying above, "Annuit Coeptis," means "He has smiled on our
accomplishments" or "our activities."

MOYERS: He-

CAMPBELL: -He, the eye, what is represented by the eye. Reason. In
Latin you wouldn't have to say "he," it could be "it" or "she" or "he."
But the divine power has smiled on our doings. And so this new world
has been built in the sense of God's original creation, and the
reflection of God's original creation, through reason, has brought this
about.

If you look behind that pyramid, you see a desert. If you look before
it, you see plants growing. The desert, the tumult in Europe, wars and
wars and wars-we have pulled ourselves out of it and created a state in
the name of reason, not in the name of power, and out of that will come
the flowerings of the new life. That's the sense of that part of the
pyramid.

Now look at the right side of the dollar bill. Here's the eagle, the
bird of Zeus. The eagle is the downcoming of the god into the field of
time. The bird is the incarnation principle of the deity. This is the
bald eagle, the American eagle. This is the American counterpart of the
eagle of the highest god, Zeus.

He comes down, descending into the world of the pairs of opposites, the
field of action. One mode of action is war and the other is peace. So
in one of his feet the eagle holds thirteen arrows-that's the principle
of war. In the other he holds a laurel leaf with thirteen leaves-that
is the principle of peaceful conversation. The eagle is looking in the
direction of the laurel. That is the way these idealists who founded
our country would wish us to be looking-diplomatic relationships and so
forth. But thank God he's got the arrows in the other foot, in case
this doesn't work.

Now, what does the eagle represent? He represents what is indicated in
this radiant sign above his head. I was lecturing once at the Foreign
Service Institute in Washington on Hindu mythology, sociology, and
politics. There's a saying in the Hindu book of politics that the ruler
must hold in one hand the weapon of war, the big stick, and in the
other the peaceful sound of the song of cooperative action. And there I
was, standing with my two hands like this, and everybody in the room
laughed. I couldn't understand. And then they began pointing. I looked
back, and here was this picture of the eagle hanging on the wall behind
my head in just the same posture that I was in. But when I looked, I
also noticed this sign above his head, and that there were nine
feathers in his tail. Nine is the number of the descent of the divine
power into the world. When the Angelus rings, it rings nine times.

Now, over on the eagle's head are thirteen stars arranged in the form
of a Star of David.

MOYERS: This used to be Solomon's Seal.

CAMPBELL: Yes. Do you know why it's called Solomon's Seal?

MOYERS: No.

CAMPBELL: Solomon used to seal monsters and giants and things into
jars. You remember in the Arabian Nights when they'd open the jar and
out would come the genie? I noticed the Solomon's Seal here, composed
of thirteen stars and then I saw that each of the triangles was a
Pythagorean tetrakys.

MOYERS: The tetrakys being?

CAMPBELL: This is a triangle composed of ten points, one point in the
middle and four points to each side, adding up to nine: one, two,
three, four/five, six, seven/eight, nine. This is the primary symbol of
Pythagorean philosophy, susceptible of a number of interrelated
mythological, cosmolog-ical, psychological, and sociological
interpretations, one of which is the dot at the apex as representing
the creative center out of which the universe and all things have come.

MOYERS: The center of energy, then?

CAMPBELL: Yes. The initial sound (a Christian might say, the creative
Word), out of which the whole world was precipitated, the big bang, he
pouring of the transcendent energy into and expanding through the field
of time. As soon as it enters the field of time, it breaks into pairs
of opposites, the one becomes two. Now, when you have two, there are
just three ways in which they can relate to one another: one way is of
this one dominant over that; another way is of that one dominant over
this; and a third way is of the two in balanced accord. It is then,
finally, out of these three manners of relationship that all things
within the four quarters of space derive.

There is a verse in Lao-tzu's Tao-te Ching which states that out of the
Tao, out of the transcendent, comes the One. Out of the One come Two;
out of the Two come Three; and out of the Three come all things.

So what I suddenly realized when I recognized that in the Great Seal of
the United States there were two of these symbolic triangles
interlocked was that we now had thirteen points, for our thirteen
original states, and that there were now, furthermore, no less than six
apexes, one above, one below, and four (so to say) to the four
quarters. The sense of this, it seemed to me, might be that from above
or below, or from any point of the compass, the creative Word might be
heard, which is the great thesis of democracy. Democracy assumes that
anybody from any quarter can speak, and speak truth, because his mind
is not cut off from the truth. All he has to do is clear out his
passions and then speak.

So what you have here on the dollar bill is the eagle representing this
wonderful image of the way in which the transcendent manifests itself
in the world. That's what the United States is founded on. If you're
going to govern properly, you've got to govern from the apex of the
triangle, in the sense of the world eye at the top.

Now, when I was a boy, we were given George Washington's farewell
address and told to outline the whole thing, every single statement in
relation to every other one. So I remember it absolutely. Washington
said, "As a result of our revolution, we have disengaged ourselves from
involvement in the chaos of Europe." His last word was that we not
engage in foreign alliances. Well, we held on to his words until the
First World War. And then we canceled the Declaration of Independence
and rejoined the British conquest of the planet. And so we are now on
one side of the pyramid. We've moved from one to two. We are
politically, historically, now a member of one side of an argument. We
do not represent that principle of the eye up there. And all of our
concerns have to do with economics and politics and not with the voice
and sound of reason.

MOYERS: The voice of reason-is that the philosophical way suggested by
these mythological symbols?

CAMPBELL: That's right. Here you have the important transition that
took place about 500 B.C. This is the date of the Buddha and of
Pythagoras and Confucius and Lao-tzu, if there was a Lao-tzu. This is
the awakening of man's reason. No longer is he informed and governed by
the animal powers. No longer is he guided by the analogy of the planted
earth, no longer by the courses of the planets-but by reason.

MOYERS: The way of-

CAMPBELL: -the way of man. And of course what destroys reason is
passion. The principal passion in politics is greed. That is what pulls
you down. And that's why we're on this side instead of the top of the
pyramid.

MOYERS: That's why our founders opposed religious intolerance-

CAMPBELL: -That was out entirely. And that's why they rejected the idea
of the Fall, too. All men are competent to know the mind of God. There
is no revelation special to any people.

The Power of Myth
by Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385418868/

http://www.whidbey.com/parrott/moyers.htm
http://www.mustardseed.net/html/tomythsmythology.html
http://www.synaptic.bc.ca/ejournal/campbell.htm
http://www.synaptic.bc.ca/ejournal/seattle.htm
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=171