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She sits there. She is now a woman. And what is a woman? A woman is a vehicle of life. Life has overtaken her. Woman is what it is all about—the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment. She is identical with the earth goddess in her powers, and she has got to realize that about herself.
The women are 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. MOYERS: What’s the significance, that the woman is controlling the dance? CAMPBELL: Well, the woman is life, and the man is the servant of life.
Such a happening? Have you ever known that kind of ecstasy or witnessed it? CAMPBELL: No, I have not. I have friends who have been in Haiti a good deal and actually participated in voodoo ceremonials there where people become possessed. And there are dances where the ecstasy is simulated. There was an old idea of going berserk in war, of exciting warriors before they go to battle. They should actually be in a madness while they’re in battle—the battle frenzy.
There is a definition of God which has been repeated by many philosophers. God is an intelligible sphere—a sphere known to the mind, not to the senses—whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is 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. That’s a nice mythological realization that sort of gives you a sense of who and what you are. MOYERS: So it’s a metaphor, an image of reality. CAMPBELL: Yes. What you have here is what might be translated into raw individualism, you
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For example, we may go visit the Holy Land, because that’s the land of our religious origins. But every land should be a holy land.
Your whole commitment is to the society which is protecting you. Society is always patriarchal. Nature is always matrilineal.
So we have the same story springing up in cultures unrelated to each other. What does that say about it? CAMPBELL: That is one of the amazing things about these myths. I have been dealing with this stuff all my life, and I am still stunned by the accuracies of the repetitions. It is almost like a reflex in another medium of the same thing, the same story. Instead of corn, or maize, it’s a coconut.
We’re kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life.
That death is life, and life is death, and that the two are in accord? CAMPBELL: That you have to balance between death and life—they are two aspects of the same thing, which is being, becoming.
But, as Jung says, you’d better not get caught in a symbolic situation. You don’t have to die, really, physically. All you have to do is die spiritually and be reborn to a larger way of living. MOYERS:
Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don’t get that experience, but suddenly, in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror—but, by God, you are alive. Those young men in Vietnam were truly alive in braving death for their fellows. MOYERS:
