Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth; 103; The First Storytellers

You The animal envoys of the unseen power no longer serve as in primeval times to teach and to guide mankind. Bears, lions, elephants and gazelles are in cages and azures. Man is no longer the newcomer in a world of unexplored planes 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.

Neither in body nor in mind do inhabit the world of those hunting races of the Paleolithic millennia, to whose lives and life ways we nevertheless owe the very forms of our bodies and structures of our minds. Memories of their animal envoys still must sleep somehow within us for they wake a little and stir when we venture into wilderness. They wake in terror to thunder and again they wake with a sense of recognition when we enter any one of those great painted caves. Whatever the inward darkness may have been to which the shamans of those caves descended in their trenches, the same must lie within ourselves, nightly visited and sleep. I found myself understanding for the first time how profoundly human it is to contemplate our world.

I found myself understanding for the first time how profound the human it is to contemplate our world. Animals obviously experienced death too. They watch each other die. But as far as we know they don't imagine something beyond death. We do. Somewhere around 250,000 to 50,000 BC our earliest ancestors left us the first tangible evidence of mythological thinking. They buried their dead as if they were going somewhere. Evidence of food, tools and sacrificial animals has been found in those burial caves as if to wish the dead Bon Voyage. The endothal man also seems to have thought that some godly beings from another world like to drop in for a visit disguised as animals.

Primitive humans depended on those visitors for food and clothing. But after killing them, either from gratitude for their sacrifice or guilt over their murder, the hunters appear to have prepared them for the trip back home. High mountain caves have been found with bare skulls preserved ceremoniously and placed in symbolic settings. These early humans were obviously disposed of the possibility of another plane of existence. One they had to reckon with because their lives were bound to it in some mysterious, essential way. The very idea gave them hope. Maybe this difficult, hard-scrabble life is not all there is. They also had to do some serious thinking. How do we get ready for the next one? They began to devise stories to bridge the gulf between what they could see and what they could only imagine. Our first myths, perhaps, about this world and the world of the gods. Joseph Campbell was fascinated with these first storytellers. Their mythic stories were not simply entertaining tales to be told for amusement around the campfire.

They were powerful guides to the life of the spirit. Myths helped our ancestors explain the movement of the sun across the sky, the changing of the seasons, even the mystery of creation. Through the millennia, they became what he called the wonderful soul of the souls, high adventure. In this conversation, one of the many I take with Joseph Campbell at George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch during the last two years of his life, we talked about these first stories and the people who told them. Like them, we too have to come to terms with our immortality and anticipate our destiny with death. What do you think our souls owe to ancient myths? Well, the ancient myths were designed to put the mind, the mental system, into a cord with this body system, with this inheritance, to harmonize. The mind can ramble off in strange ways and want things that the body does not want.

And the myths and rights were means to put the mind in a cord with the body and the way of life in a cord with the way that nature dictates. So in a way these old stories live in us? They do indeed. And the stages of a human development are the same today as they were in the ancient times. And the proud of a child brought up in a world of discipline, of obedience, and of his dependency on others, has to be transcended when one comes to maturity so that you are living now not in dependency but with self-responsible authority. And the problem of the transition from childhood to maturity, and then from maturity and full capacity to losing those powers and acquiescing in the natural cause of, you might say, the autumn time of life and the passage away, myths are there to help us go with it, accept nature's way and not hold to something else. The stories are sort of to me like messages in a bottle from sure as someone else's visited first.

Yes, and you're visiting those shores now. And these myths tell me how others have made the passage and how I can make the passage. And also what the beauties are of the way. I feel this now moving into my own last years, you know, the myths help me to go with it. What kind of myth? Give me a one that has actually helped you. Well, the tradition in India, for instance, of actually changing your whole way of dress, even changing your name as you pass from one stage to another. When I retired from teaching, I knew that I had to create a new life, a new way of life, and I changed my manner of thinking about my life. Just in terms of that notion of moving out of the sphere of achievement, into the sphere of enjoyment and appreciation, and relaxing into the wonder of it all.

And then there is that final passage through the dark gate? Well, that's no problem at all. The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to lose it, is to identify yourself, not with the body which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. And when you can do that, and this is something I learned from my myths, what am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle? And this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this thing go, like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes this, but it's expectable, you know? And then gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness rejoins consciousness. I mean, that's no longer in this particular environment.

And the myths, the stories have brought this consciousness. Well, I live with these myths, and they tell me to do this all the time. And this is the problem which can be then metaphorically understood as identifying with the Christ in you. And the Christ in you doesn't die, the Christ in you survives death and resurrects. Or it can be with Shiva, Shiva, Han, I am Shiva. And this is the great meditation of the yogis and the Himalayas. And one doesn't have, even to have a metaphorical image like that, if one has a mind that's willing to just relax and identify itself with that which moves it. You say that the image of death is the beginning of mythology. What do you mean? How is that? Well, all I can say to that is that the earliest evidence we have of anything like mythological thinking is associated with grave burials.

And they suggest what? That men, women saw life, and then they didn't see it, and they wondered about it? It must have been, I mean, one has only to imagine what one's own experience would be. The person was alive and warm before you and talking to you. He's now lying there, getting cold, beginning to rot. Something was there that isn't there, and where is it? Now, animals have this experience, certainly, of their companions dying and so forth. But there's no evidence that they've had any further thoughts about it. Also, before the time of Neanderthal man, it's in his period that the first burials appear, of which we have evidence, the people were dying and they were just thrown away. But here's a concern. Have you ever visited any of these burial sites?

I've been to Lemoustier, that was one of the earliest burial caves that were found. And you find there what they buried with the date? Yes, these grave burials with grave gear, that is to say, weapons and sacrifices round about, certainly suggest the idea of the continued life beyond the visible one. The first one that was discovered, personally, is put down, resting as though a sleep of a young boy with a beautiful hand axe beside him. Now, at the same time, we have evidence of shrines devoted to animals that have been killed. The shrines specifically are in the Alps, very high caves, and they are of cave bear skulls. And there's one very interesting one with the long bones of the cave bear in the cave bear's jaw.

What is it saving you? My friend has died and he survives. The animals that I've killed must also survive. I must make some kind of atonement relationship to them. The indication is of the notion of a plane of being that's behind the visible plane and which is somehow supportive of the visible one to which we have to relate. I would say that's the basic theme of all mythology. That there is a world that is an invisible plane supporting the visible one. Now, whether it is thought of as a world or simply as an energy, that difference from time and time and place to place. What we don't know supports what we do know. That's right. The basic hunting myth, I would say, is of a kind of covenant between the animal world and the human world,

where the animal gives its life willingly. They are regarded generally as willing victims with the understanding that their life, which transcends their physical entity, will be returned to the soil or to the mother through some ritual of restoration. The principle rituals, for instance, and the principle divinities are associated with the main hunting animal. The animal who is the master animal and sends the flux to be killed. The Indians of the American planes was the buffalo. You go to the northwest coast, it's the salmon. The great festivals have to do with the run of salmon coming in. When you go to South Africa, the islands, the big magnificent antelope, is the principle animal for the bushman, for example. And the principle animal, the master animal.

So there grew up between human beings and animals, a bonding, as you say, which required one to be consumed by the other. That's the way life is. Do you think this troubled early man? Absolutely, that's why you have the rights because it did trouble. What kind of rights? Rituals of appeasement to the animals, of thanks to the animal. Very interesting aspect here is the identity of the hunter with the animal. As the animal has been killed, the hunter then has to fulfill certain rights in a kind of participatory mystique, a mystic participation with the animals, who deaths he has brought about and whose meat is to become his life. So the killing is not simply slaughtered. Anyway, it's a ritual act. It's a recognition of your dependency and of the voluntary giving of this food to you by the animal who has given it. It's a beautiful thing. It turns life into a mythological experience.

The hut becomes what? It becomes a ritual. The hunt is a ritual. Expressing a hope of resurrection that the animal was food and you needed the animal to return. And some kind of respect for the animal that was killed. That's the thing that gets me all the time in this hunting ceremonial system. Respect for the animal. And more than respect. I mean, that animal becomes a messenger of divine power, you see. And you wind up as the hunter killing the messenger. The killing of the god. What does this do? Does it cause guilt? Does it cause guilt? The guilt is wiped out by the myth. It is not a personal act. You are performing the work of nature. For example, in Japan and Hokkaido, the other in Japan, among the Ainu people, whose principal mountain deity is the bear. When it is killed, there is a ceremony of feeding the bear a feast of its own flesh.

As long as he worked present and he is present, he served his own meat for dinner. And there's a conversation between the mountain god, the bear and the people. They say if you will give us the privilege of entertaining you again, we'll give you the privilege of another bear sacrifice. If the cave bear were not appeased, the animals wouldn't appear and these primitive hunters would starve to death. So they began to perceive some kind of power on which they were dependent greater than their own. And that's the power of the animal master. Now when we sit down to meal, we thank God, our idea of God for having given us this. These people thank the animal. And is this the first evidence we have of an act of worship, of power, superior to man?

And the animal was superior because the animal provided food. Well, now in contrast to our relationship to animals, where we see animals as a lower form of life and in the Bible we're told you know where the master is and so forth. Early hunting people don't have that relationship to the animal. The animal is in many ways superior. He has powers that the human being doesn't have. And then certain animals take on a persona, don't they? The buffalo, the raven, the eagle. Very strongly. Well, I was up in the Northwest toast back in 1932. There were wonderful trips. And the Indians along the way were still carving totem poles. The villagers had new totem poles still. And there we saw the ravens and we saw the eagles and we saw the animals that played roles in the myths. And they had the character, the quality of these animals. They were very intimate knowledge and friendly, neighborly relationship to these creatures. And then they killed some of them, you see.

The animal had something to do with the shaping of the myths of those people. Just as the buffalo for the Indians of the plains played an enormous role. They're the ones that bring the tobacco of gift, the mystical pipe and all this kind of thing. It comes from a buffalo. And when the animal becomes the giver of ritual and so forth, they do ask the animal for advice and the animal becomes the model for how to live. You remember the story of the buffalo's wife? That's a basic legend of the Blackfoot tribe and is the origin legend of their buffalo dance rituals, by which they invoke the cooperation of the animals in this play of life. When you realize the size of some of these tribal groups to feed them required a good deal of meat. And one way of acquiring meat for the winter would be to drive a buffalo herd to stampede it over a rock cliff.

Well, this story is of a Blackfoot tribe long ago. And they couldn't get the buffalo to go over the cliff. The buffalo would approach the cliff and then turn the side. So it looked just though they weren't going to have any meat for that winter. Well, the daughter of one of the houses, getting up early in the morning to draw the water for the family and so forth, looks up and there right above the cliff were the buffalo. And she said, oh, if you only come over, I'd marry one of you. And to her surprise, they all began coming over. That was surprise number one, surprise number two was when one of the old buffaloes, the shaman of the herd, comes and says, all right, girly off we go. Oh, no, she says, oh, yes, he said, you made your promise. We've kept our side of the bargain. Look at all my relatives here dead off we go. Well, the family gets up in the morning and they look around and wears many, you know, with the father, you know, how Indians are, he looked around, he said, she's run off at a buffalo.

You could see about the footsteps. So he says, oh, I'm going to get her back. So puts on his walking mark, Parkinson's, bow and arrow and so forth and goes out over the plains. He's gone quite a distance when he feels he better sit down and rest and he comes to a place that's called a buffalo wallow where the buffalo like to come a roll around, get the lights off and roll around in the mud. So he sits down there and is thinking what he should do now when long comes a magpie, not a beautiful flashing bird and it's one of those clever birds that has shamanic qualities. Magical and the man says to him, oh, beautiful bird. He said, my daughter ran away with a buffalo. Have you seen, when you hunt around, see if you can find her out on the plains somewhere. And the magpie says, well, there's a lovely girl with the buffaloes right now over there just a bit away. Well, he said, the man, when you go tell her that her daddy's here, her father's here at the buffalo wallow.

Magpie flies over and the girl is there among the buffalo. They're all asleep. I don't know what she's doing, knitting or something. And the magpie comes over closer and he says, your father's over at the wallow waiting for you. Oh, she says, this is terrible. This is dangerous. I mean, these buffalo will never kill us. You tell him to wait. I'll be over. I'll try to work this out. So her buffalo husband's behind her and he wakes up and takes off a horn. He says, go to the wallow and get me a drink. So she takes the horn and goes over and there's her father. He grabs her by the arm. He says, come, she says, no, no, no. This is real danger the whole herd. They'll be right after us. I have to work this thing on. Now, let me just go back. So she gets the water and goes back and he sees five foe from my smell, the blood of an Indian. You know, that sort of thing. And she says, no, nothing of the kind. He says, yes indeed. So he gives a buffalo bellow and they all get up. They all do a slow buffalo dance with their tails raised and they go over. They trample that poor man to death so that he disappears entirely.

It's just all broken up to pieces and all gone. The girl's crying. And her buffalo husband says, so you're crying. This is my daddy. He said, yeah, but what about us? There are children, wives, parents and you crying about your daddy. Well, apparently he was a kind of sympathetic compassionate buffalo and he said, well, I'll tell you, if you can bring your daddy back to life again, I'll let you go. So she turns to the magpie and says, see, pick around a little bit to 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 little girl says, that's plenty. Now that we put this down on the ground and she puts her blanket over it and she sings a revivifying song, a magical song with great power.

And, apparently, yes, there's a man under the blanket. She looks daddy, all right, but he's not breathing yet. A few more stances of whatever the song was and he stands up and the buffalo are amazed. They say, well, why don't you do this for us? We'll teach you now our buffalo dance and when you will have killed our families, you do this dance and sing this song and we'll all be back alive again. That's the basic idea. Through the ritual, that dimension is struck which transcends temporality and out of which life comes back into which it goes. It goes back to this whole idea of death, burial and resurrection, not only for human beings, but for the animals too. So the story of the buffalo's wife was told to confirm the reverence.

That's right. What happened when the white man came and slaughtered this animal of reverence? That was a sacramental violation. I mean, in the 80s, when the buffalo hunt was undertaken... In the 80s, there was a buffalo bill and so forth. When I was a boy, whenever we went for sleigh rides, we had buffalo robes. Buffalo, buffalo, buffalo robes all over the place. This was the sacred animal in the Indian. These hunters go out with repeating rifles and shoot down the whole herd and leave it there. Take the skin to sell and the body is left to rot. This is a sacral inch. And it really is a sacral inch. It turned the buffalo from a thou. To an it. The Indians addressed the buffalo as thou. A thou. An object of reverence.

The Indians addressed life as a thou. I mean, trees and stones and everything else. You can address anything as a thou and you can feel the change in your psychology as you do it. The ego that sees a thou is not the same ego that sees an it. Your whole psychology changes when you address things as an it. And when you go to war with the people, the problem of the newspapers is to turn those people into it's so that they're not doused. That was an incredible moment in the evolution of American society when the buffalo was slaughtered. That was the final exclamation point behind the destruction of the Indian civilization because you were destroying. Can you imagine what this experience must have been for people within ten years to lose their environment, to lose their food supply, to lose the central object of their ritual life?

So it is in your belief that it was in this period of hunting man and woman, the time of hunting man, that the human beings began to censor stirring of the mythic imagination, the wonder of things that they didn't know. There is this burst of magnificent art and all the evidence you need of a mythic imagination in full career. You visited some of the great painted caves. Tell me what you remember when first you looked upon those underground. Well you didn't want to leave. Here you come into an enormous chamber like a great cathedral with these animals painted. And they're painted with the life light, the life of an ink on silk in the Japanese painting. And when you realize the darkness is inconceivable, we're there with electric lights.

But in a couple of instances the concierge, the man who was showing us through, turned off the lights and you were never in darker darkness in your life. It's like a, I don't know, just a complete knockout of, you don't know where you are, where you're looking, north, south, east or west. All orientation is gone and you're in a darkness that never saw the sun. Then they turned the lights on again and you see these gloriously painted animals. A bull that will be 20 feet long. And painted so that the haunches will be represented by a swelling in the rock. You know, they take account of the whole thing, it's incredible. Do you ever look at these primitive art objects and think not of the art but of the man or woman standing there painting or creating? I find that's where I speculate. This is what hits you when you go into those caves, I can tell you that.

What was in their mind when they were doing that and that's not an easy thing to do and how did they get up there and how did they see anything? And what kind of light did they have? Little flashing torches, throwing, flickering things and then to get something of that grace and perfection. And with respect to the problem of beauty, is this beauty intended or is it something that is the natural expression of a beautiful spirit? You know what I mean? When you hear a bird sing, the beauty of the bird's song, is this intentional? In what sense is it intentional? But it's the expression of the bird, the beauty of the bird's spirit, you might almost say. And I think that way very often about this art, to what degree was the intention of the artist what we would call aesthetic? Or in what to what degree expressive, you know, and to what degree something that they simply had learned to do that way, it's a point. When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider's nature, you know, it's instinctive beauty.

And how much of the beauty of our own lives is of our beauty of being alive and how much of his conscious intentional, that's a big question. You call them temple caves. Why, why temple? People with images and stained glass windows, cathedrals are a landscape of the soul. You move into a world of spiritual images. That's what this is. When Tina and I, my wife and I drove down from Paris to this part of France, we stopped off at Shach Cathedral. There is a cathedral. It's the mother womb of your spiritual life. Mother church. All the forms around are significant of spiritual values. And the imagery is an anthropomorphic form.

God and Jesus and the saints and all in human form. Then we went down to the last go. The images were an animal form. The form is secondary. The message is what's important. The message of the cave. The message of the cave is of a relationship of time to eternal powers that is somehow to be experienced in that place. Now, I tell you, when you're down in those caves, it's a strange transformation of consciousness you have, you feel this is the womb. This is the place from which life comes. And that world up there in the sun with all those things, that's a secondary world. This is primary. I mean, this system all becomes you. You had that feeling with you. I had it every time. Now, what were these caves used for? The regulations that are most common of scholars interested in this is that they had to do with the initiation of boys into the hunter.

You go in there, it's dangerous. It's very dangerous. It's completely dark. It's cold and dank. You're banging your head on projections all the time. And it was a place of fear. And the boys were to overcome all that. Go into the womb of the earth. And the shamans, or whoever it was that would be helping you through, would not be making it easy. And then there was a release. Once you got into that vast torch-lit chamber down there, what was the tribe? What was the tradition trying to say to the boy? That is the womb land from which all the animals come. And the rituals down there have to do with the generation of a situation that will be propitious for the hunt. And the boys were to learn not only to hunt, but how to respect the animals and what rituals to perform, and how in their own lives no longer to be little boys, but to be men.

Because those hunts were very, very dangerous hunts, believe me. And these are the original men's right sanctuaries, where the boys became no longer their mother's sons, but their father's sons. Don't you wonder what effect there's had on a boy? Well, you can go through it today, actually, in cultures that are still having the initiations of young boys. They give them an ideal, a terrifying ideal that the youngster has to survive. Makes a man of him, you know. What would happen to me as a child if I went through one of these rights as far as I could? Well, we know what they do in Australia. I want a boy, I guess, to be, you know, a little bit ungovernable. One fine day, the men come in, and their naked except for stripes of white down that have been stuck on their bodies and stripes with their men's blood. They use their own blood for glue, gluing this on, and they're swinging the bull rawers, which are the voice of the spirits, and they come as spirits.

The boy will try to take refuge with his mother. She'll pretend to try to protect him. The men just take him away, and mother's no good from then on. You see, he's no longer a little boy. He's in the men's group, and then they put him really through an ideal. These are the rights, you know, of circumcision, sub-incision, and... The whole purpose is to... Turn them into a member of the tribe. At a hunter. And a hunter, because that was the way of life. Yeah, but most important is to live according to the needs and the values of that tribe. He has initiated in a short period of time into the whole culture context of his people. So, myth relates directly to ceremony and tribal ritual, and the absence of myth can mean the end of ritual.

A ritual is the enactment of a myth. By participating in a ritual, you are participating in a myth. What does it mean, you think, to young boys today that we absent these myths? Well, the confirmation ritual is the counterpart today of these rights. As a little Catholic boy, you choose your confirmed name, the name you're going to be confirmed by, and you go up. But instead of having them scarify you, knock your teeth out, and all, the bishop gives you a mild slap on the cheek. It's been reduced to that. Nothing's happened to you. The Jewish counterpart is the bomb, it's fun. And whether it works, actually, to affect the psychological transformation, I suppose it will depend on the individual case. There's no problem in these old days. The boy came out with a different body and he'd gone through something. What about the female?

I mean, most of the figures in the temple caves are male. Was this a kind of secret society for males? The one in the secret society wasn't the boys had to go through it. Now, we don't know exactly what happens with the female in this period, because we have very little evidence to tell us. In primary cultures today, the girl becomes a woman with her first menstruation. It happens to her. I mean, nature does it to her. And so she has undergone the transformation. And what is her initiation? Typically, it is to sit in a little hut for a certain number of days and realize what she is. How does she do that? She sits there. She's now a woman. And what is a woman? A woman is a vehicle of life. And life has overtaken her. She is a vehicle now of life. The woman is what it's all about. The giving of birth and the giving of nourishment.

She is identical with the earth goddess in her powers. And she's got to realize that about herself. The boy does not have a happening of that kind. He has to be turned into a man and voluntarily become a servant of something greater than himself. The woman becomes the vehicle of nature. The man becomes the vehicle of the society. The social order and the social purpose. What happens when a society no longer embraces powerful mythology? What we've got on our hands. The dice, if you want to find what it means not to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times. And you'd find? Well, the news of the day. Young people, young people who don't know how to behave in a civilized society, have to, I imagine, 50% of the crime is by young people in their 20s and early 30s that just behave like barbarians.

Society has provided the no rituals in which they become members. There's been a reduction or reduction of ritual. We're even in the Roman Catholic Church, my God. We've translated the mass out of the ritual language into a language that has a lot of domestic associations. So that, I mean, every time now that I read the Latin of the mass, I get that pitch again and it's supposed to give a language that throws you out of the field of your domesticity. The altar is turned so that the priest is back as to you and with him you address yourself outward like that. Now they turn the altar around. It looks like junior child giving a demonstration. And it's all homey and cozy. And they play guitar? They play guitar. Listen, they've forgotten what the function of a ritual is,

is to pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time. So ritual that once conveyed an inner reality is now merely form. And that's true in the rituals of society and the rituals of marriage and religion. Well, with respect to ritual, it must be kept alive. And so much of our ritual is dead. It's extremely interesting to read of the primitive elementary cultures. How the folk tales, the myths, they transform me all the time in terms of the circumstances of those people. People move from an area where let's say the vegetation is the main support out into the plains. Most of our plains Indians in the period of the horse riding Indians, you know, had originally been of the Mississippi in culture along the Mississippi in settled dwelling towns and culturally based villages.

And then they receive the horse from the Spaniards. And it makes it possible then to venture out in the plains and handle the great hunt of the buffalo herds, you see. And the mythology transforms from vegetation to buffalo. And you can see the structure of the earlier vegetation mythologies under the mythologies of the Dakota Indians, and the Pawnee Indians, and the Kyoah, and so forth. You're saying that the environment shapes the story? They respond to it, do you see. But we have a tradition that comes from the first millennium BC somewhere else, and we're handling that. It has not turned over and assimilated the qualities of our culture, and the new things that are possible, and the new vision of the universe, it must be kept alive.

The only people that can keep it alive are artists of our kind, or another. But his function is the mythologization of the environment and the world. Artists being the poet, the musician, the author. Exactly. The writer. Yes. And I think we've had a couple of greats in the recent times. I think of James Joyce as such a revealer of the mysteries of growing up and becoming a human being. And for me, he and Thomas Mann were my principal gurus, who might say, as I was trying to shape my own life. I think in the visual arts, there were two men who seemed to me to handle mythological themes in a marvelous way. One was Paul Clay and the other Picasso. These two men really knew what they were doing all the way, I think, and had a great versatility in their revelations. I mean, our artists are the myth makers of our day.

The myth makers in earlier days were the counterparts of our artists. They do the paintings on the walls and the form, the rituals. There's an old romantic idea in German dust folk. That's the poetry of the traditional cultures and the ideas come out of the folk. They do not. They come out of an elite experience, the experience of people particularly gifted, whose ears are open to the song of the universe. And that they speak to the folk, and there is an answer from the folk, which is then received. There's an interaction, but the first impulse comes from above, not from below, in the shape of folk traditions. So who would have been in these early elementary cultures, as you call them, the equivalent of the poets today? The shaman. The shaman is the person who has, in his late childhood, early youth. Could be male or female, had an overwhelming psychological experience that turns them totally inward.

The whole unconscious has opened up and they've fallen into it. And it's been described many, many times, and it occurs all the way from Siberia, right through the Americas down to Tierra del Fuego. It's a kind of schizophrenic crack up, the shaman experience. What kind of experience? Dying and resurrecting, you know, being on the brink of death and coming back, actually experienced the death experience. People who have very deep dreams, dream is a great source of the spirit. And then people who in the woods have had mystical encounters. Well, let me try to be specific about it. The shaman becomes some person in a society who is drawn by experience from the normal world into the world of the gifted. That's right. Most of us think of shaman as a magician, but they play a much more important role than simply being a... Oh no, they play the role that the priesthood plays in our society.

These are the priests? Well, there's a major difference, as I say, between a shaman and a priest. A priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry on that ritual. And the deity, to whom he is devoted, is a deity that was there before he came along. The shaman's powers are symbolized in familiars, deities of his own personal experience, and his authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination. Do you understand what I mean? And the one who had this psychological experience, this traumatic experience, this ecstasy, would become the interpreter for others of things not seen? He would become the interpreters of a heritage of mythological life, you might say, yes. An ecstasy was a part of it, very often, in the shamanic history.

It is ecstasy. The trans dance, for example, in the Bushman society. Now, there's a fantastic example of something. The little Bushman groups. The whole life is one of great, great tension. The male and female sexes are, what am I saying, in a disciplined way separate. The men have a certain field of concerns, their weapons, the poisons, and the hunt, and all that, and the women have a certain field of concern, the bringing up the children, the nourishing of the children, and so forth, and so on. Only in the dance did the two come together, and they come together this way. The women sit in a circle, or a group, and they then become the center around which the men dance, and they control the dance, and what goes on with the men, through their own singing and beating of the thighs. What's the significance of that, that the woman is controlling the dance? Well, the woman is life, and the man is the servant of life, and during the course of this circling circling

a very tense style of movement the men have, suddenly, that one of the male pass out. He's in trance now, and this is a description of an experience. When people sing, I dance. I end of the earth. I go in at a place like a place where people drink water. I travel a long way, very far. When I emerge, I'm already climbing. I'm climbing threads. I climb one and leave it. Then I climb another one, then I leave it, and I climb another. When you arrive at God's place, you make yourself small. You come in small to God's place. You do what you have to do there. Then you return to where everyone is. You come and come and come, and finally you enter your body again. All the people who have stayed behind are waiting for you. They fear you.

You enter, enter the earth, and you return to enter the skin of your body, and you say. That is the sound of your return to your body. Then you begin to sing. The utumasters are there around. They take hold of your head and blow about the sides of your face. This is how you manage to be alive again. Friends, if they don't do that to you, you die. You just die and are dead. Friends, this is what it does. This is an utum that I do. This is an utum here that I dance. This is an actual experience of transit from the earth to through the realm of mythological images to God or to the seat of power. It becomes something of the other mind of us. It is exactly the other mind.

And the way God is imaged, God is transcendent, finally, of anything like a name of God. As the Hindus say, beyond names and forms, beyond damarupam, beyond names and forms, no tongue has soiled it. No word has reached it. But, Joe, can Westerners grasp this kind of mystical, trans-theological experience? It does transcend theology, at least theology behind. I mean, if you're locked to the image of God in a culture where science determines your perceptions of reality, how can you experience this ultimate ground that the shamans talk about? The best example I know in our literature is that beautiful book by John Neihart, called Black Elk Speaks. Black Elk was. Black Elk was a young Sue, or a decoder, it's also called, a boy, around nine years old. But before the American cavalry had encountered the Sue, they were the great people of the plains.

And this boy became sick, his psychologically sick, his family, telling the typical shaman story. The child begins to tremble and is immobilized, and the family is terribly concerned about it. And they send for a shaman, who had had the experience in his own youth, to come as a psychoanalyst, you might say, and pull the youngsters out of it. But instead of relieving him of the deities, he is adapting him to the deities, and the deities to himself, you might say, it's a different problem from that of psychoanalysis, where you, I think it was Nietzsche who said, be careful, less than casting out your devil, you cast out the best thing that's in you. But here, the deities who have been encountered, the powers, let's call them, are retained. The connection is retained, it's not broken.

And these men then become the spiritual advisors and gift givers of their people. Well, what happened with this young boy, he was brought nine years old, was he had a vision, and the vision is described. And it's a vision prophetic of the terrible future that his tribe was to have. But it also spoke of the possible positive aspects of it. It was a vision of what he called the hoop of his nation, realizing that it was one of many hoops, which is something that we haven't all learned well enough yet. And the cooperation of all the hoops of all the nations and grand processions and so forth. But more than that, it was an experience of himself as going through the realms of spiritual imagery that were of his culture and assimilating their import. And it comes to one great statement, which for me is a key statement to the understanding of myth and symbols. He says, I saw myself on the central mountain of the world, the highest place. And I had a vision because I was seeing in a sacred manner of the world.

And the sacred central mountain was Harnie Peak in South Dakota. And then he says, but the central mountain is everywhere. That is a real mythological realization. Why? It distinguishes between the local cult image, Harnie Peak, and its connotation, the center of the world. The center of the world is the hub of the universe, Axis Mundi, the central point, pole star around which all revolves. The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, stillness is eternity, realizing the relationship of the temporal moment to the eternal, not moment, but forever is the sense of life. Realizing how this moment in your life is actually a moment of eternity and the experience of the eternal aspect of what you're doing in the temporal experience is the mythological experience, and he had it.

So is the central mountain of the world, Jerusalem, Rome, Benares, Lausa, Mexico City? Mexico City, Jerusalem is symbolic of a spiritual principle as the center of the world. So this little Indian was saying there is a shining point where all lines intersect? That's exactly what he said. He was saying God has no circumference. God is an intelligible sphere than say a sphere known to the mind, not to the senses, whose center is everywhere, and circumference, nowhere, and the center bill is right where you're sitting. And the other one is right where I'm sitting, and each of us is a manifestation of that mystery.

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