The Power of Myth

by Joseph Campbell

Well, we don’t know what they did in the caves, but we know what the aborigines do in Australia. Now, when a boy gets to be a little bit ungovernable, one fine day the men come in, and they are naked except for stripes of white bird down that they’ve stuck on their bodies using their own blood for glue. They are swinging the bull-roarers, which are the voices of spirits, and the men arrive as spirits. The boy will try to take refuge with his mother, and she will pretend to try to protect him. But the men just take him away. A mother is no good from then on, you see. You can’t go back to Mother, you’re in another field. Then the boys are taken out to the men’s sacred ground, and they’re really put through an ordeal—circumcision, subincision, the drinking of men’s blood, and so forth. Just as they had drunk mother’s milk as children, so now they drink men’s blood. They’re being turned into men. While this is going on, they are being shown enactments of mythological episodes from the great myths. They are instructed in the mythology of the tribe. Then, at the end of this, they are brought back to the village, and the girl whom each is to marry has already been selected. The boy has now come back as a man.