SOURCE: Campbell, Joseph, and Michael Toms. “Myth as Metaphor.” In An Open Life, edited by John M. Maher and Dennie Briggs, pp. 21-53. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.

[In the following interview, Campbell discusses various elements of mythology, the role of the shaman and the court jester, and Aztec and Mayan societies.]

[Toms]: We tend to use the word “myth” to mean something that is untrue or an erroneously held belief. Why is that?

[Campbell]: I can understand why that idea arose. Myth is metaphor. The imagery of mythology is symbolic of spiritual powers within us: when these are interpreted as referring to historical or natural events which science in turn shows could not have occurred, then you throw the whole thing out. You see, myths do not come from a concept system; they come from a life system; they come out of a deeper center. We must not confuse mythology with ideology. Myths come from where the heart is, and where the experience is, even as the mind may wonder why people believe these things. The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact.

When you think, for instance, “God is thy father,” do you think he is? No, that's a metaphor, and the metaphor points to two ends: one is psychological—that's why the dream is metaphoric; the other is metaphysical. Now, dream is metaphoric of the structures in the psyche, and your dream will correspond to the level of psychological realization that you are operating on. The metaphysical, on the other hand, points past all conceptualizations, all things, to the ultimate depth. And when the two come together, when psyche and metaphysics meet, then you have a real myth. And when that happens the sociological and the cosmological aspects of your life have to be re-visioned in terms of these realizations.

So there are two stages to this: one is going inward, and finding the relationship of your own deepest self to the ground of being so that you become transparent to transcendence; the other is bringing this realization back into operation in the field, which is the work of the artist—to interpret the contemporary world as experienced in terms of relevance to our inner life.

To me, all mythologies are provinces of one great system of feeling. I think of the mythological image as an energy-evoking sign that hits you below the thinking system. Then words can be found to interpret the mythic image: image of the structure. Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life. And a poet working within a mythological system has the advantage of the major structuring images being already at hand. All he's giving is part of the big myth.

So that out of your search for understanding you create a myth.

No, I think it's not so much a search for understanding as it is sudden insight. You walk into a forest, you're not in quest of something. Suddenly you are struck by the wonder of this place. A woodpecker flies past: this tells you something about the wonder of the whole world of birds, of nature and so forth. And if you are a poet, you will attempt to render the quality of that experience insofar as it pushes right through to the ultimate mystery of being and life itself. That such a creature should be there! That the universe should be here! That's something that excites you to wonder.

We are mentally oriented in our period, so we always think it's a quest for interpretations. The theory that myths were attempts to answer questions about meaning was very popular at the end of the last century, and at the beginning of this one; but now we realize that these are great poems and that they don't represent answers but are attempts to express insights.

Now, in the older traditions, this was generally understood. One such symbolic theme, for example, is the virgin birth which occurs throughout American Indian mythology. This is what awakened me to the realization that these things had nothing to do with historical events. The mythic image of the virgin birth refers to the birth of the spiritual life in the human animal. We can live with the same interests as animals: clinging to life, begetting future generations, and winning our place in the world. But then there can open the sense of the spiritual quest and realization—the birth of the spiritual life. And this essentially is the virgin birth.

There are several elements in mythology: the Hero, for instance, and the Call. When did “the Call” first appear in mythology?

In mythology? That's the essence of mythology, I would say. The theme of the visionary quest; the one who goes to follow a vision. It appears one way or another in practically every mythology I know of.

So it's the core of all myth.

Yes, because the Hero is the one who has gone on the adventure and brought back the message, and who is the founder of institutions—and the giver of life and vitality to his community.

In the chapter of The Hero with a Thousand Faces entitled “The Refusal of the Call,” you talk about how we often follow society, and with the Call the reverse is what's more appropriate.

There are two ways of living a mythologically grounded life. One way is just to live what I call “the way of the village compound,” where you remain within the sphere of your people. That can be a very strong and powerful and noble life. There are, however, people who feel this isn't the whole story. And today, all historical circumstances are changing, and we no longer have the enclosing horizons that shut us in from knowledge of other people—new worlds are breaking in on us all the time. It's inevitable that a person with any sense of openness to new experience will say to himself, “Now, this won't do, the way we're living.” Do you see what I mean? And so, one goes out for one's self to find a broader base, a broader relationship.

On the other hand, there's plenty of reason for those who don't have this feeling to remain within the field because our societies today are so rich in the gifts that they can render. But if a person has had the sense of the Call—the feeling that there's an adventure for him—and if he doesn't follow that, but remains in the society because it's safe and secure, then life dries up. And then he comes to that condition in late middle age: he's gotten to the top of the ladder, and found that it's against the wrong wall.

If you have the guts to follow the risk, however, life opens, opens, opens up all along the line. I'm not superstitious, but I do believe in spiritual magic, you might say. I feel that if one follows what I call one's “bliss”—the thing that really gets you deep in the gut and that you feel is your life—doors will open up. They do! They have in my life and they have in many lives that I know of.

There's a wonderful paper by Schopenhauer, called “An Apparent Intention of the Fate of the Individual,” in which he points out that when you are at a certain age—the age I am now—and look back over your life, it seems to be almost as orderly as a composed novel. And just as in Dickens' novels, little accidental meetings and so forth turn out to be main features in the plot, so in your life. And what seem to have been mistakes at the time, turn out to be directive crises. And then he asks: “Who wrote this novel?”

Life seems as though it were planned; and there is something in us that's causing what you hear of as being accident prone: it's something in ourselves. There is a mystery here. Schopenhauer finally asks the question: Can anything happen to you for which you're not ready? I look back now on certain things that at the time seemed to me to be real disasters, but the results turned out to be the structuring of a really great aspect of my life and career. So what can you say?

And the other point is, if you follow your bliss, you'll have your bliss, whether you have money or not. If you follow money, you may lose the money, and then you don't have even that. The secure way is really the insecure way and the way in which the richness of the quest accumulates is the right way.

Joseph, in that same chapter on the Call, you wrote: “The myths and folk tales of the whole world make clear that the refusal [of the Call] is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one's own interest.” And then you go on to talk about how we get fixed in our own security and our own ideals and are reluctant to see them change.

Yes. And it can even get so that you can't make them change.

That brings up the whole connection of myth to the adventure. I'd like to hear you talk about that.

There's a kind of regular morphology and inevitable sequence of experiences if you start out to follow your adventure. I don't care whether it's in economics, in art, or just in play. There's the sense of the potential that opens out before you. And you have no idea how to achieve it; you start out into the dark. Then, strange little help-mates come along, frequently represented by little fairy spirits or the little gnomes, who just give you clues, and these open out. Then there is the sense of danger you always run into—really deep peril—because no one has gone this way before. And the winds blow, and you're in a forest of darkness very often and terror strikes you.

So often we see those dark places as huge problems rather than as opportunities. What does mythology have to say about that?

Well, mythology tells us that where you stumble, there your treasure is. There are so many examples. One that comes to mind is in The Arabian Nights. Someone is plowing a field, and his plow gets caught. He digs down to see what it is and discovers a ring of some kind. When he hoists the ring, he finds a cave with all of the jewels in it. And so it is in our own psyche; our psyche is the cave with all the jewels in it, and it's the fact that we're not letting their energies move us that brings us up short. The world is a match for us and we're a match for the world. And where it seems most challenging lies the greatest invitation to find deeper and greater powers in ourselves.

Toynbee speaks of challenge and response, and every culture and individual runs into these challenges. If the power to respond fails, then that's the end. But where the power to respond succeeds, there comes a new amplification of life and consciousness.

When I wrote about the Call forty years ago, I was writing out of what I had read. Now that I've lived it, I know it's correct. And that's how it turned out. I mean, it's valid. These mythic clues work.

What does the saying “Dread the passage of Jesus, for he does not return” mean to you in the context of what we've been talking about?

Jesus represents the inspiration to life, I mean the life of the spirit, not simply of physical conditions, but the thing that is life for man, namely the spiritual adventure. He comes and is the awakener; and if you close your mind to that awakener, he may not come back again. You can lose it. I think there are many myths, many epic stories, of the awakening which then passes and you can't even think what it was.

There's an extremely interesting psychological story of a woman in the hills of West Virginia who, when she was a little girl walking through the woods, heard wonderful music. And when she got home, she forgot what it was. Now, this is a woman in her late sixties who felt that she had missed her life, and it was only while in psychoanalysis that it came out that the song she had heard was the Call.

This, curiously, is precisely the problem of the shaman: the young person who is alone on the seashore or in the forest and hears music; those people who have the knowledge that the music must somehow be followed must stay with it. It may make a lonely life for you, but that is your life. And this to me was a very interesting theme. I'm sure that in our world, where emphasis is put on success and all that, the song is heard and forgotten by young people.

That's missing the Call. “Dread the passage of Jesus, for he may not return.”

Does the Call only occur when you're young?

Oh, no! But it first occurs when you're young. Do you know that lovely poem by Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star …

And then he tells of the shades of the prison house beginning to close upon the growing boy, but he can still see the light in his joy. But it may yet be closed down.

On the other hand, if you stay open, you'll not only hear the song, but you'll hear it in great symphonic composition as you go on, so that you know that you're still on the track.

The other aspect of mythology that has always fascinated me, is the vision quest. What is the vision quest?

That is part of the basic myth. It is the quest to find the visionary relationship to the world. And as the world changes, the vision quest changes as well.

Now, the first visions were those of the shamans in the caves. But their people were just very small groups compared with the population now. When settled peoples began to increase, about the ninth millennium B.C., the problem of relating to those shamanic visions came up and the more complicated priestly relationships developed. Then the shaman is replaced by the priest, who represents the gods of the community. The shaman's deities were his own private familiars whom he discovered in vision; the deities of a larger social group are inherited by the tribe. And the priest is the officer of those deities. He doesn't necessarily experience them as the shaman does. Now, that poetic experience is what we've got to have again. It's much easier to have a poetic experience in the beautiful mountains and forests of California than it is to have the poetic experience in the factories of Detroit, but that's where it's got to be. To reactivate our world the vision quest has to deal with our world.

Another aspect of the vision quest is the encounter with demons.

Our demons are our own limitations, which shut us off from the realization of the ubiquity of the spirit. And as each of these demons is conquered in a vision quest, the consciousness of the quester is enlarged, and more of the world is encompassed. Basically the vision quest involves getting past your own limitations, which are within even as they appear to be without. They are symbolized in myth as monsters and demons, and in each age the characteristics change; because as a people changes, so do its limitations.

In some sense, our gods become our demons, don't they?

My definition of a devil is a god who has not been recognized. That is to say, it is a power in you to which you have not given expression, and you push it back. And then, like all repressed energy, it builds up and becomes completely dangerous to the position that you're trying to hold.

One of the best examples of that is the trickster figure in American Indian myth: the coyote, and the rabbit. He's at once a fool and a creator. He's a fool in that he's not acting in terms of the order of life in progress; and he's a creator in that he is the unrecognized, yet pressing energies that are threatening to break through.

One of the obsessions, I think, in Christianity is the Devil. When I turn from reading Oriental and tribal mythologies to any orthodox Christian work, suddenly the Devil is there. I think he's more important than God. He's the reason for all the wars against other people. He justifies the massacre of primitive tribes. They are all “Devil worshipers.” Anyone who has an experience of the divine that's not of some particular clergy, is worshiping the Devil. And “Devil” is the word that's actually used for other people's gods.

I like that story about Padmasambhava, who went to Tibet and was faced with all of these demons, and evil deities of the Bon tradition. He basically transformed them into protectors of the dharma, and that's exactly what we're talking about.

That's an old mythological trick. The savior hero overcomes a demon and then makes him the protector. There's a wonderful story of the Buddha, two incarnations before his last, when he was Prince Five Weapons. As a young man, he had learned how to use five weapons. He's riding home now, a triumphant young warrior prince, when out of a forest comes a great big demon, a great monster, who's name is “Sticky Hair.” The future Buddha is threatened by this monster, so he throws his javelin at him and it sticks in the monster's hair. Then he gets his bow and arrow and sends arrow after arrow at the monster, and they all stick in his hair. Then he throws his discus and it sticks in his hair. He takes his sword; it also sticks. He takes his club, and that, too, sticks in his hair. Then he hits him with his right fist, then his left; they stick. He kicks him with his right foot, then with his left; these also stick. Then Prince Five Weapons butts the monster with his head. Do you recognize this? This is Brer Rabbit with his Tar Baby. It's the same story. So he's stuck!

The demon says, “I'll bet you're frightened now, boy, huh?”

And Prince Five Weapons says, “No. I'm not, because I have within me a knowledge that will blow both of us to smithereens, and you're afraid of that. I'm not.”

So the demon says, “Okay.” And lets him loose.

The Buddha had conquered Sticky Hair. And then what did he do? He made him the guardian of that wood. It's giving due recognition to the monster; dealing with it, and then giving it its place. Its place might be the very same place it had all along, only you've now recognized that place and its importance. Do you see what I mean?

And the relevance to that in everyday life is that so often we tend to repress our demons and shove them into the background, push them into the closet and not deal with them.

And then they become the monsters.

And what could be the creative adventure becomes the journey through hell. Why do you think we continue to repress our demons and not deal with them?

Because they ask for a larger dimension in our lives than we're willing or able to give. I mean, it's important to hold a form and not just to explode. But in doing that, you should know what the powers are that are being asked to hold back, because recognizing them is part of integrating them. And the form that you're holding is held in relation to what it's not doing.

Say that again.

What?

[Michael laughs]: Say the same thing differently. How's that?

Well, I think you have to control your life; you can't let all of your impulse system take over. You wouldn't have a life. You'd go to pieces.

But in some sense, when you follow the adventure, you really have to let go of wanting to control it.

That's the problem. And that's why I say, “Heavy winds blow.” There's a saying in one of the Upanishads, “The narrow blade of a razor is this: it's a narrow, difficult path.” And the problem is that this is the real power of the left hand path of following your bliss instead of instructions. You're following the lead of your emotion and of your vitality; but the head has to be there all the time because you're on a narrow ridge and in danger of falling off. That is to say, letting too much of the torrent of energy come through will blow it.

There's nothing right or wrong when you're on the path, but there is imprudent and prudent action. Do you see what I mean? Because while you're beyond good and evil, as soon as you step out of the society, you can lose your life. Life is a dangerous path.

What is the counterpart of the vision quest in Christian mythology?

The mystical approach. What might be called the Pentecostal point of view: through your own inward experience, the divine mystery is revealed.

This is the wonderful thing about the American Indian tradition: that sense of a divine realization is possible to everyone, and one's whole life is based on the experience of that vision. Whether the young man was to become a great warrior or a shaman or a chieftain was revealed to him at that time. So you find your own way through experience—a way in the world in which you're living.

Why is it important to appreciate such a myth? And is it relevant to our times?

I think that for Americans, American Indian material is very important, because the mythology is rooted in the land as well as in the psyche. Our mythology has been brought from the Near East, a very long time ago, and it does not relate to our land unless we can, through our own experience, make it so. Do you see? And if you do not have that experience, then the Holy Land is somewhere else. But the great realization of mythology is the immanence of the divine—here and now—you don't have to go anywhere else for it. This is the holy land, the holy moment. And to find the Christ-power here is the goal of such a meditation.

Myth also informs us about the stage of life we're in. Isn't that so?

Yes. Actually, that's one of the main functions of myth. It's what I call the pedagogical: to carry a person through the inevitable stages of a lifetime. And these are the same today as they were in the paleolithic caves: as a youngster you're dependent on parents to teach you what life is, and what your relationship to other people has to be, and so forth; then you give up that dependence to become a self-responsible authority; and, finally, comes the stage of yielding: you realize that the world is in other hands. And the myth tells you what the values are in those stages in terms of the possibilities of your particular society.

Let's take a typical myth that most people would be familiar with: King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and the search for the Holy Grail. How would that myth relate to the present?

There are about four quite distinct versions of the Grail quest. The earliest example we have is by Chrétien de Troyes, around 1190. But the most magnificent one is that of Wolfram von Eschenbach, about 1220. The best known version in the English language is that of a Cistercian monk whose name is lost to us. In that story, Galahad plays the main role.

Now the versions of Chrétien and Wolfram have a married man as the hero, who is a virtuous and competent warrior knight. On the other hand, the Cistercian quest which is called La Queste del Saint Graal, gives us the monkish figure, Galahad. For me, the great one is the quest of Parzival.

The problem of the grail quest is the re-vivification of what is known as the Waste Land. The Waste Land is a world where people live not out of their own initiative, but out of what they think they're supposed to do. People have inherited their official roles and positions; they haven't earned them. This is the situation of the Waste Land: everybody leading a false life. T. S. Eliot used that idea in his poem, The Waste Land, and he actually quotes several lines from Wolfram's Parzival. The Waste Land is a place where the sense of the vitality of life has gone. People take jobs because they have to live, and then they find in mid-life that the job doesn't mean a thing.

Now, the hero of the Grail is one who acts out of his own spontaneous nature. He comes to the Grail castle where the Grail king is maimed and lame, as the whole country is. Why is he maimed and lame? Because he just inherited the job. I won't go through how it all happened, but the sense of it is that he was not living out of the spontaneity of his own life. Unfortunately, when the hero of the Grail was told how to be a knight, he was told that knights do not ask questions. So when he sees the maimed king, he is moved to ask, “What ails you?” That is, the quality of compassion and sympathy moves him. But then he thinks, “A knight does not ask questions,” and so he represses the impulse of his nature, and the quest fails. It takes him five or six more years to get back to the castle. But the spunk and pluck of his tenacity on the quest, and the revision of the mistake he made, yield the healing of the land.

So the meaning of the Grail and of most myths is finding the dynamic source in your life so that its trajectory is out of your own center and not something put on you by society. Then, of course, there is the problem of coordinating your well-being and your virtue with the goods and needs of the society. But first you must find your trajectory, and then comes the social coordination.

You once said that certain mythic heroes need never have existed in actuality, but are myths nevertheless. How could a myth just exist in its own right?

Well, I like to suggest that book of John Neihardt's, Black Elk Speaks. It's a perfect example of how a mythology can get born. Here was a boy only about nine years old, when he had this simply glorious vision, which Neihardt, as a great poet, was able to translate from the old medicine man's expression of it. It was a vision experienced in a sort of shamanic trance-state, and it came before the battle of Wounded Knee: that is to say, when the whole Indian world of our great West was really broken up. But what did the vision say? The vision said: “We have to change our center from a buffalo-oriented religion to a plant-oriented religion. Furthermore, the hoop of our little society has to be recognized among many other hoops.” That was the prophetic insight that came. And that wonderful image of the transformation of the tree and the hoop among hoops—this is good stuff for today. A tribe that thought it was It is now in a multiple heterogeneous world. And this dear old man, when he was ninety or so, said: “I had a vision with which I might have saved my people, but I had not the strength to do it.”

So what does he do with this vision?—and this is what is always done with prophetic visions of this kind—he teaches the people how to render it in a ritual activity. There's an interplay between the prophet and the people to whom he's talking. There is a dialogue between the great visionary and the people out of whom he has come. A myth originates from a poetical insight on somebody's part. He has experienced potentials that all of them might have experienced had they been poets.

Now, a ritual is the enactment of a myth: by participating in the rite, you participate in the myth. Myths don't count if they're just hitting your rational faculties—they have to hit the heart. You have to absorb them and adjust to them and make them your life. And insofar as the myth is a revelation of dimensions of your own spiritual potential, you are activating those dimensions in yourself and experiencing them.

When you find a poem or a picture that really appeals to you, and awakens you, there is someone who went ahead of you and gives you that experience; and it may be life-shaping. A myth is a life-shaping image.

Ritual, however, very soon becomes rote.

That's always the danger. But that's the danger, for example, in an art school. The work of the great master is imitated, and you have a series of imitations done with more or less skill.

How can we keep the poetry alive?

This is the whole problem of being alive, keeping your active imagination going. I know a lot of people who have done it. It's not something that just happens to you. If you spend all of your time thinking of economic problems, you're not going to spend enough time on your own inward imaginative world. You're not going to spend enough time on that to have anything really significant come of it. But you can participate in the visions of others: playing music, looking at pictures, going to museums.

The Olympics is another example of a ritual, isn't it?

Well, it started as a ritual in ancient Greece. And when you go to Delphi you really get the sense of the Greek ideal. At Delphi there was the Oracle, the unconscious, the depth speaking, telling you the truths. And there are the beautiful temples, and the theater. All these buildings were associated with religious experience. And at the top is the stadium where the events were held. And any young Greek who could run a good 180 yards was eligible to participate.

The ideal of the total man is a beautiful idea, and the Greeks represented it in a way that no other culture did. There were athletics in other traditional cultures but usually they were associated with the governing caste, or the warrior caste. But in Greece the idea of the total man held forth. I guess the Greeks were the first to have the Idea of Man, instead of man of a special race or a special career.

You mentioned the shaman in regard to the vision quest and Black Elk. Could you talk a little about the importance of the shaman and his role?

The medicine man was primarily one who'd had a profound psychological experience in adolescence—the shamanic crisis—what would be diagnosed today as a schizophrenic crack-up. He has gone into the world of the unconscious and met its demons and deities. I mentioned the person walking on the seashore or in the forest, and he hears a strange music. This is the music of the spirits talking to him. A relationship is established, and he's got to hold on to that relationship; otherwise he loses his life. He is brought out of the crisis by the ministrations of an older shaman who gives him mythic instruction and the disciplines to function as a shaman. Now, the life of a shaman was a difficult one, of deep psychological responsibilities and experiences which he himself hardly understood. It was really a form of mystical experience of an accord with an aspect of nature. And with regard to that, his social position was one of isolation and of practices of his spiritual craft. He related to his society in certain specific ways: healing—that was his principal role—and conjuring the animals of the hunt into manifestation, knowing where they were, and other kinds of services. But he was typically feared. And the instrument of his song—the drum—was of tremendous power. The high statement of shamanism, as far as our anthropological information goes, was in Siberia. And the shaman's drum was of such a magical power that if the tribe were moving, the shaman with his drum would follow on a kind of sledge; no one could walk on the ground that the drum had passed over. The shaman's powers were great, and among the American Indians even today, shamanic practices are still effective.

The shaman is primarily associated with early hunting cultures. Later, in agriculturally based societies, he is in a secondary position.

There are in the caves in France—Lascaux and others—a number of representations of shamans in action.

Yes. The other source of our knowledge of the shaman is from the Siberian peoples, and the North American Indian tribes. The figure now in the primary role is the priest, who is an ordained official of the tribal or village deities; these are not of his personal experience. He is in the service of the society and its deities, for the priestly society. The shaman is an archaic danger. He represents the early mystic, one who has had the individual mystic experience and is supported by his familiars—his own special deities—whereas the priest is supported by and is in turn the supporter of the culture deities. The two systems are inherently in conflict. The priest is the man of the book; the shaman is the man of the experience. Of course, in the priestly culture there are also mystics who are the counterparts to the shaman. Now, with the insecurity that we feel regarding our religious institutions, there is a kind of drift to the shamanic idea.

Is the shaman in the realm of the Hero myth? Could a man like Castenada's Don Juan relate to a Quetzalcoatl, say, and become a myth that could be passed down?

Well, now, Quetzalcoatl, or Kukulcán in the Mayan formulation, is a high culture figure and he is intimately related to the observations that were made on the cycles of the planet Venus. His disappearances and reappearances and their timing, as well as the legends associated with them, are geared right in to the cycle of the planet Venus in relation to the cycles of the sun and the moon, and to the artificial cycle of thirteen times twenty days of the Mayan-Aztec calendars. So, for a figure like Don Juan ever to be translated into that context would require a high-culture absorption of the figure. Now, the whole question of Quetzalcoatl is an interesting one because the figure certainly is mythological; and yet there was also a historical character by that name, who is important in the history of Yucatan. No doubt the historical character was named after the mythic character and then the two became contaminated in our received traditions. It's as though a person were named Jesus, as many a Spaniard or Mexican is, and that person's life story got mixed up with the story of Jesus of Nazareth, you see? I think something like that has happened in the handing down of the legends associated with Quetzalcoatl. Now, if a person like Don Juan had initiated some historical event of momentous significance, he might become assimilated to a Quetzalcoatl idea. But that model derives from a cosmological observation.

Don Juan does fit other aspects of the Hero myth.

Oh, it's a Hero myth. No doubt about it. But there are different kinds of Hero myths. Any visionary can become a figure of a Hero myth, as does Moses when he goes up on the mountain and envisions the Word and comes back with it. That's the Hero deed of going in quest of the Word and coming back and delivering the Word.

There are many Navaho legends in which people go off into the fields or mountains, following the call of a mountain goat or something, have some illumination, and then come back with a teaching. Black Elk is a Hero figure. But he did not himself associate with a cosmological principle.

It has to have a more universal application?

Yes. Exactly that. Now, the historical character of Jesus is assimilated into Christianity through the theological Person—that is, the second Person in the Blessed Trinity, who's not a historical character but is antecedent to time. The crux of Christianity is the identification of that historical character as the only incarnation in history of the second Person of the Blessed Trinity. The second Person in the Blessed Trinity is a theological principle. When Paul says, “I live now not I, but Christ in me,” he didn't say Jesus, the historical character, in me, he said “Christ in me.”

Let me ask you about another matter. What about the role of the fool?

Well, again in primitive hunting cultures, that's the trickster hero. Almost all non-literate mythology has a trickster hero of some kind. American Indians had the great rabbit and coyote, the ravens, and blue jay. And there's a very special property in the trickster: he always breaks in, just as the unconscious does, to trip up the rational situation. He's both a fool and someone who's beyond the system. And the trickster hero represents all those possibilities of life that your mind hasn't decided it wants to deal with. The mind structures a lifestyle, and the fool or trickster represents another whole range of possibilities. He doesn't respect the values that you've set up for yourself, and smashes them.

The fool really became the instructor of kings because he was careless of the king's opinion, careless of the king's power; and the king allowed this because he got wisdom from this uncontrolled source. The fool is the breakthrough of the absolute into the field of controlled social orders.

To some extent, we've lost our court jesters.

Some of our journalists are real court jesters, I think. And at the end of the Tarot cards is the Fool, the one who's gone through all the stages that are represented in that series of cards, and now can wander through the world, careless and fearful of nothing.

From your knowledge of mythology and the ancient past, is it possible that other civilizations, greater than our own, once flourished on the earth and have totally disappeared?

It would be hard to know where they would have been. Civilization, as we usually think of the term, involves monumental architecture, writing, and mathematical systems—things of that sort. These all come in as a constellation about 3500 B.C. in Mesopotamia. The next great jump is in Egypt itself, which then becomes one of the most majestic civilizations ever because it was relatively protected. And for 4,000 years, there it was, right up to the time of the Theodosian Code in the fourth century A.D.

China during the Shang Dynasty [c. 1523 B.C.] is not a high civilization; it's neolithic, with planting and ceramic ware, but not what we would call a civilization. And we know that Indian civilization starts about 2500 B.C. in the Indus Valley. And that's fairly well documented all the way down.

Then you jump to the Americas. The Olmec culture suddenly appears about 1100 B.C. And where in heaven's name would the others be? One talks about Lemuria and Atlantis, but the whole Lemurian situation is infinitely before the appearance of man on earth. You have to have some regard for geology! And as for Atlantis: I don't know what to say about that. There's no geologist who stands by it. The Atlantis legend which occurs in the Timaeus and the Critias of Plato has now been rather convincingly associated with that wonderful island in the Aegean, Thera, which really exploded about 1485 B.C. That's the period of the whole cycle of mother goddess legends, the world of old Europe, of which Marija Gimbutas has written in The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, 6500 to 3500 B.C. That is the period when the Miocene patriarchal system came over, just at the time the Hebrews were invading Canaan, and also bringing in a father-god. So, there certainly was a turnover in the mythological thinking of mankind about that time, moving from the mother-goddess to the father-god. But we know those earlier systems flourished. And we don't have to hypothesize an island in the Atlantic.

When the Atlantis legend was translated into modern thinking out of Plato, it still was thought—this was in the early nineteenth century—that the Mayan period was close in time to the Egyptian; but it wasn't.

Are the pyramids of South America the result of diffusion?

Yes.

Do you believe that the Mayans came from Atlantis and went to Egypt?

No!

The movement, then, is definitely from East to West.

That's the way the evidence points, it seems to me. Now, Hyerdal came across from the Egyptian realm, and we may find there was diffusion across the Atlantic from Egypt. But then why so late? The Egyptian pyramids date from about 2500 B.C., and the Mayan pyramids date from about 500 A.D. There's a little difference of 3,000 years. So where were these people all that time? Floating around somewhere? Did they get lost somewhere on the Island Inaccessible, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and then push off again 3,000 years later? There's got to be another explanation, I think. At least it doesn't convince me at all. The whole Atlantis-in-the-middle-of-the-Atlantic theory has trouble. When those theories were first proposed, at the end of the nineteenth century, these things weren't properly understood, and it was thought that people went eastward and westward and built pyramids. But you can't do that now. It seems to me the people who hold to this kind of thought are very, very slipshod about dates; and dates are kind of a mania for me.

So you're saying that the Yucatan pyramids couldn't have come from Egypt because of the 3,000-year gap.

Yes. And I am saying they did come from China and that area where there are temple pyramids which are not the same as the Egyptian pyramids. The Egyptian pyramids are pointed on top. The pyramids of Mesopotamia have a stairway, and a temple on top. And that's the kind of temple you have in the Mayan-Aztec zone. That's also the kind of temple you have in India, and in Southeast Asia. In the Aztec and Mayan ruins you have the same, modified by the material they used, of course. But the analogy is not with the Egyptian temple.

Perhaps a psychological significance could be attached to that common form.

You have to ask why people would want a temple like that. Why a great tower with a temple on top? It's because it represents a mythological concept of the cosmos. The idea is that the cosmos is a great mountain, with stages of worlds on the way up, the ultimate personification of the divine power being in that realm on the summit. It's with Mesopotamia to the Mayan-Aztec world that we have the closest analogues. Along with that comes astronomy: different powers located in the same planets. Likewise, mathematics is based on a 20 system here, on a 60 system over there, on a 10 over there, and so forth. Reading Morley's The Ancient Maya years ago, I noted the motifs from the Maya that parallel the Eastern traditions, and I filled three pages!

These seem to be universal truths which are bound to crop up in different places, each to find its own expression.

To speak for diffusion doesn't diminish the force of the psyche. Why does it last? It lasts because it has a symbolic meaning. It excites a resonance in the psyche, and a truth is somehow suggested.

A pyramid and a temple are more obvious, perhaps, than a piece of pottery.

Now, pottery is one of the most telling clues of diffusion because they can even analyze the glazes, the motifs, and the forms. There's a kind of pottery vessel, for example, that appears in China which stands on three legs; and the legs have the shape of a woman's breast, and they're standing on the nipples. Those occur in Mexico also. Now, that's a bizarre notion!

One of the big finds that I've reproduced in The Mythic Image is of a figure from Georgia seated in lotus position; not only in lotus position, but with the right hand in the boon-bestowing posture and the mouth slightly open in a kind of ecstasis. And right in the same culture context is a hand in a boon-bestowing posture with an eye in the palm, just as in the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, and it's surrounded by serpent forms. Of course they're rattlesnakes here, because that's the great sacred serpent. But what are you going to do with this?

Are you saying, then, that the Mayans came at just a certain point from China?

I wouldn't want to put the whole thing that way and say that the Mayans came from China. But what I am saying is that the motifs of their iconography do match, in many essential ways, those of the high Far Eastern culture complexes, which include Indian material. There is very strong convincing evidence of trans-Pacific influences, dating from as early as 3000 B.C., and Robert Heine-Geldern actually gave a schedule of dates which I reproduced in The Mythic Image. Now, of course, when there is an outside influence, it's developed in the receiving area and it requires new stylistic inflections, as well as new things from the animal and vegetable world round about. And so there is great creative development.

To say that the motifs couldn't have come from the East, I think, is very hard. It's miraculous either way you read it actually; but my guess is for diffusion.

When I started The Masks of God years ago, I promised myself that I would not make a decision; I was just going to present the evidence and not load it with my own judgment. But the more I worked on it, the more I found myself thinking: “This has come across the water.” And how it came, I cannot say; nobody can. Now, you mentioned pottery. About ten years ago, pottery was discovered on the coast of Ecuador—the Valdivia pottery—which matched perfectly Middle Joman pottery from Kyushu, Japan, 3000 B.C. And in the publication from the Smithsonian Institution, you can't tell the difference between Middle Joman and Valdivia pottery when the two are presented on one page.

When this Japanese pottery was found in Ecuador, the first explanation offered was that a Japanese sampan or something of the kind got lost on the ocean, and there is an actual Pacific current that runs from Kyushu to the north of Hawaii and comes down to Ecuador. But does a boat of fishermen carry potters in it, so that within a few decades the pottery on this side is even more efficiently done than the pottery on that side? That just won't hold water. You've got to have some kind of significant expedition or adventure. As one scholar said in answer to critics, “If this doesn't prove diffusion, let's stop talking about pottery.”

And then there is the hero called Tunapa or Tanupa, the one who resembles Christ? According to stories, he walked through the Andes carrying a wooden cross, had disciples, and talked to people about morality. Eventually he was run off or killed. Is that a case of diffusion also?

I don't know of that particular hero. I do know of a couple of pictures, in some of the Aztec works which are pre-Columbian, that show a figure carrying a cross. Furthermore a cross is associated with Quetzalcoatl and Kukulcán. But the cross is a basic symbol for the world and the center: the four points of the compass, and the fifth point is in the middle, which is the transcendent point. And of course the savior figure is the one who transcends the pairs of opposites and is associated with the center. So, such a figure carrying a cross is striking as an analogue Via Crucis of Jesus. It's not something that would have to have been brought over by the Spaniards at all.

Wouldn't the cross tend to be of equal proportions?

It would tend to be that. But the picture I have in mind, and which is also reproduced in The Mythic Image, is of a cross with one end a little longer than the other.

Curious; it doesn't seem to fit the symbolism.

No, it doesn't, but that's the way it is. It may have had something to do with the tradition, but we don't know what the tradition associated with this figure was.

And in Palenque there is the Temple of the Cross. That temple must date from before 900 A.D. Because that area was abandoned by that time; the whole culture moved out to Yucatan. So this can't have been brought over by the Christians. There it is: the Temple of the Cross. There are two figures, one on either side of that temple. And as I say, the cross is associated with Kukulcán and Quetzalcoatl. Not only is Quetzalcoatl associated with the cross, but you have a virgin birth, a departure, a second coming; you've got the works! All associated with this hero, who's a major figure in the Mexican tradition.

There is a figure buried in the tomb of the Temple of Inscriptions. Do you have any idea who this was?

No. It could be a chieftain, a great priest; it could be a figure who was deified. Deification is easy in most cultures. The power that's represented in the deity is transferred to an individual. For instance, some of those who were sacrificed by the Aztecs were consecrated as deities and lived for a year as the deity, and then were slain, themselves believing in the tradition—because we are all gods, really, only we don't know it. And when the tradition deifies someone it simply says, “Let us regard in this person that which is true in all of us, but which we don't consider in our trade and political life”—namely, the immanence of the divine in the forms of the world.

Was it the Incas who foretold of men coming from the East with long beards and white faces?

I think that was an Aztec story. And Cortez happened to arrive right on the button, which is why he had a comparatively easy time to begin with. Of course, you can't underestimate the heroism of that act of Cortez's. It was a brutal, ruthless thing, but those men had guts. What was it—about forty men, overthrew a major empire. Of course, they had guns and horses—things that were startling to people. Then there was Pizarro, who was ruthless, entering the whole world of the Incas, driving all the way to the cities up there with no idea what he would meet; he just rode right into the main capitals.

The element of fear or of the unknown gave them the advantage?

Just imagine, you have a legend of the god from the East. The East is usually white—it's the color of dawn. Cortez arrives on a certain date, and he has gun power, explosives, and horses. Nobody there had ever seen men on horses before. And for a while they thought man and horse were one creature; they believed these were divine apparitions of a strange sort. So there was the shock effect, and from the Aztec point of view it was all pretty convincing stuff. But the fact that Cortez went on to overthrow that empire is just something fantastic. They had to tear down Tenochtitlán house by house to take it.

So their mythology prepared them for that defeat.

Well, I was just trying to say that I thought it was significant in that they thought it was the deity who came, and that delayed their realistic response to the assault. If they thought it was a deity, they did so because of the mythology they had and the mythology blinded them to what was actually going on.

How did it happen that in two parts of the continent—the Incas in the south and the Aztecs to the north—the mythology was so similar as to leave both civilizations vulnerable?

Merely that the two societies, which were very close to each other in time and place, had analogous myths.

Why was that, would you say?

Why do we have the idea of Christ's coming as a second coming? This is a standard motif in mythology: the one who has died is coming back. King Arthur wanted to come back, too, and I think probably Hiawatha as well.

That isn't what's surprising to me; or that the one from the East should be white. But I must say the coincidence of a person who fitted the description actually arriving, that's the fantastic thing. You can interpret that as you like, either as sheer coincidence or as a kind of prophetic foresight—or what Jung called “synchronicity.” The mythological analogue, in the light of all that we know about motifs running through systems, isn't so surprising. The big surprise is that it matched what actually occurred.

There's similarity that runs from South America to North America. Take Viracocha and Quetzalcoatl, for example. Do you have any reason to believe they might have been the same being?

It's an equivalent archetype, and I've made the distinction between the elementary idea or archetype and the expression of the elementary idea or archetype through the patterns and traditions of separate people. Those are the folk ideas. And in that sense, Viracocha and Kukulcán or Quetzalcoatl are of the same archetype essentially. But in one case it appears in tradition A, and in the other case in tradition B, with the historical and local provincial circumstances determining the inflection of the form, the actual application, and the mythic circumstances in which the figure appears. That's what happens everywhere. Take, for instance, the trickster hero. Wotan has a trickster motif. There are tricksters in Polynesia. The trickster in the American plains is the coyote; in the northeast it's the rabbit. And in a part of Southeast Asia it's a tiny little deer. Now the big question is: “Do these arise in parallel independent ways, or is there actual diffusion to be recognized?” And of course, it will differ from case to case.

In some cases you can actually see the diffusion. For instance, the figure of Tammuz in Mesopotamia and Syria comes to Egypt as Osiris, and there's almost no doubt about it, whereas it's a little more difficult to connect Tammuz, say, with Quetzalcoatl. Do you see what I'm saying?

Yes. This gets back to what you said earlier about myths existing in the absence of an actual hero.

Yes. There's a whole theory about mythology that's called the Euhemeristic theory. There was a classical mythographer named Euhemerus in the fourth century B.C., shortly following the time of Alexander the Great. And he noticed that Alexander, within a hundred years, had become deified in the Near Eastern zone. So he drew the conclusion that deities were amplified human beings. And this is the Euhemeristic theory. But the important thing, from my standpoint, is not that a man has become deified, but the formula of deification: why is it that when a figure becomes deified here, the same thing happens to him as to the man who is deified over there? What is the psychological principle that deifies? And what are the rules and forms that it follows in action?

The same attributes are imposed.

That's what's interesting; that's the mythologization of an entity. But even if there's no entity there, that mythological motif could come in a dream, and then the dream becomes historicized. So, in such a case, it happens in the opposite direction; it works both ways.

So is there a common symbology?

There is.

And that would account for the same attributes …

Right. But if you find chariots, let's say, in a Chinese tradition, you'd know that the chariot came to China from southeast Europe. That would be an example of diffusion. The chariot wasn't invented independently in those two places, and when the deity is seen riding a chariot, we can say that this was carried over from one culture to the other.

Now, the whole South American and Mexican tradition has its roots in the period of the Olmec and Chavín cultures, which date from about 1200 and 800 B.C., respectively. The Olmec culture starts around 1200 suddenly. The antecedents are not to be located in the area around about, at least as far as I know. The Chavín seems to be about 300 years later, but related. The sort of jaguar face motif occurs in both, and you find it, of course, in China. In The Mythic Image, I've gone into this in considerable detail in a chapter about the cosmology of the New World. And I've indicated there what I do believe, namely, that the proposed evidence for influences from China, Northern Vietnam, and Cambodia of trans-Pacific diffusion of culture traits is there. That's all. So, we have a diffusion.

It's not attributable to the collective unconscious?

No, this is diffusion. If you have one motif here, and the same element there, well then, perhaps, yes. But if you have a constellation of about fifteen or twenty elements, or the whole range of the culture context—ideas, myths, actual details of costume, things like that—what are you going to do?

What is the relationship between the collective unconscious and mythology?

Mythology is an expression of the collective unconscious. I mean, you can define it that way. And I think that the Western interest in meditation which began in the 1960s, as well as the discoveries by young people of their own source land of mythology, led to the recognition that the real echo of all this was actually in Jung.

Now, my own discovery of Jung happened when I was a student in Germany in the 1920s. I was interested in mythology at that time. But I had never found any relationship of psychology to mythology in the literature that I was introduced to in college or graduate school. But, my god, when I began reading Jung's works—particularly the work that's been translated as Symbols of Transformation! That was just one of those things that sends all the lights up in all directions! I knew that a whole new dimension of understanding of what mythology was all about had come to me. So as far as the psychological interpretation of mythology and elucidation and evaluation go, I find Jung the base. Others who interest me now also relate to him positively: Stanislav Grof, and R. D. Laing.

Perhaps the reason Jung is accessible these days, is because many have used mind-altering substances and are searching for symbols and things that are inexpressible intellectually.

I think that's likely.

Is that why Stanislav Grof is so connected with him, too?

Oh, definitely! I think the psychology of Freud tends more to relate to what Jung calls the personal unconscious. When you break past that into realms that cannot be interpreted in terms of personal experience, you're in the field of mythic forms. And if you're acquainted with the mythic forms, you understand where you are in a way that's impossible if you have no previous acquaintanceship.

When you get down into the depths of mythology, forms are beyond good and evil. With the Indian deities—this is the wonderful thing about them—the upper right hand will say, “Fear not” and below it is the boon-bestowing hand; and the upper left will have a sword, and in the lower a recently amputated head. These are the two aspects of power, the two aspects of being. In our traditions—and this is true even all the way back to the Greeks—the beneficent and the malfeasant aspects of power tend to be separated and contrary entities.

Is that when trouble arises?

No, not necessarily—provided the two are in play with each other. But when one is impugned, as in our tradition where the powers of the deep are consigned to Hell … It's interesting that the symbols of Shiva and of Poseidon are exactly those that are given to the Devil in Christian mythology—the bull's foot and the tridents. So the power which is symbolized in those forms has been pushed aside as though it should not be admitted.

In Greece, however, the two do play against each other. For instance, Apollo and Dionysus. Dionysus is that bull and serpent power playing in concord with Apollo as the contrary figure. Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy is a key book to this whole thing.

Now, where I am separated from Jung is in my interest in the historical development of mythology—what Bastian called the folk transformations of the great archetypes which occur in the different provinces of human life. That was what I dealt with in The Masks of God.

The similarities and variations.

Yes. And the accents given in various cultures to the forms. For instance, a primitive hunting culture will have a totally different emphasis from a culture that is a planting or gathering culture. In the hunting culture, the food is generally brought in by the men and they have the prestige; whereas in the early planting and collecting cultures, the women are dominant, and you get another mythological context.

Also, if you're in a realm such as the great animal plains of Siberia, Northern Europe, and North America, you have a horizon that is a perfectly defined circle with the great dome of the sky over it. But if you are in the jungle lands of Brazil, Africa, or India, there is no sky and there is no horizon—you've got another world. Above you are the leafy treetops with singing birds; beneath is the leafy undergrowth with scorpions and serpents. So you not only have the female figure with vegetation all about—rotting vegetation and fresh vegetation coming up from the land—but you also have no horizon. Quite a different environment.

Have you found that situation more compatible to a matriarchal society?

Well, I wouldn't say “matriarchal.” But it's a society in which the mother goddess principle—the earth principle—is dominant. Power is sought from the plant world. Whereas in the hunting societies, you'll find a god principle—the thunder-hurler or the solar light—as male, and the shamans will be moving upward, and the myths will tell of excursions into the upper sphere or beyond the horizon.

One final question. You've been talking about mythology in terms of guidelines. But does myth provide answers?

Only insofar as it points to certain commonalities. The main drift of mythology, if you want to put it into a sentence or two, is that the separateness that is apparent in the phenomenal world is secondary; beyond, and behind, and within, and supporting that world is an unseen but experienced unity and identity in us all. And the first level of unity that is recognized is that of the family. And the second level of unity, which is deeper, is of the tribe or the social unit. But beyond that is a common human identity.

There's another wonderful question Schopenhauer asked: How is it that an individual can so participate in the danger and pain of another that, forgetting his own self-protection, he moves spontaneously to the other's rescue, even at the cost of his own life? Schopenhauer's answer is that a metaphysical realization is showing its force in action, namely, the realization that you and that other are one, and that the sense of separateness is simply a function of the way we experience things in space and time.

Now, that spontaneous compassion, I think, would jump culture lines. If you were to see someone of a totally alien world—even a person of a race or nation that you had no sympathy for—the recognition of a common human identity would spark a response. And the ultimate reference of mythology is to that single entity, which is the human being as human.

So we almost have to go beyond rational thought to catch that connection.

This is irrational. That's the point. All compassion, all sympathy, is irrational. Love is irrational. The rational is always stressing I-thou opposites. The mind is in the world of separateness and angular structures. It's a world put together in a way that can be calculated. Compassion, love—these jump mathematics.

Perhaps the nature of conflict is related to the inability to go beyond the mind, to recognize the connection that we all have.

That's right. But then the opposite problem comes up: becoming too strongly linked to the commonalty—losing touch with your own individuality. Part of our loyalty to life is being loyal to our own lives, you see, not sacrificing your self, but letting oneself play in relation to the other in a prudent and positive way.

Striking a balance.

Exactly that. Striking a balance.